


Kiss Me With Adventure

by Zee



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Comeplay, D/s themes, Facials, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Masturbation, Oral Sex, Voyeurism, following orders but in a sexy way, much like canon, references to pork products, some drinking but it's not much, there's some context-typical angst but mostly it's yuri being a furious little shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-08
Updated: 2017-11-02
Packaged: 2018-09-15 19:22:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 36,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9252302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zee/pseuds/Zee
Summary: The stranger looked at him. Yuri felt like he should keep fighting, or at least interrogate this unknown person, but he couldn’t make any words come out.Who are you? Why are you here?“We should get out of here,” the stranger said after a moment. We? What we! Yuri had come here alone and that was how he should exit, go back to headquarters and regroup.“I know a place,” he said instead.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This would not exist without marbleflan's assistance and encouragement. 
> 
> Title is from "Cliffs Edge" by Hayley Kiyoko. Yuri and Otabek are both a few years older at the start of this than they are at the end of season one. Rating will go up in later chapters.
> 
>    
> *  
>  
> 
> I learned the alphabet from street signs,  
> turning pages of iron and tin.  
> They take the world,  
> spin it  
> with fingertips—  
> and teach you.  
> It’s all just a puny globe.  
> But I  
> learned geography with my ribs—  
> lying on the earth  
> on roofless nights.
> 
> _-Vladimir Mayakovsky, "I Love"_

In addition to an exhaustive list of accomplishments that included fluency in six languages, an encyclopedic knowledge of international border regulations, and a talent for creating pipe bombs that would make most anarchists weep with jealousy, Yuri Plisetsky was proficient in hand-to-hand combat. Proficient, but not much above and beyond. Slender-framed and still clinging to the ambiguity of youth, Yuri’s specialty was undercover: he could adopt the disaffected slouch of an angry teen disappearing onto a crowded city bus, innocuous and conspicuous with a loud mouth and louder clothes; he could play the bored prep school prodigy sullenly skulking around the banquet table at a political gala; he could be the clumsy busboy who happens to spill a 30-year vintage in the lap of a certain diplomat’s expensively trousered lap. When confrontation became inevitable, Yuri’s mission plan was always escape, never engagement. He’d spent more time in the field skimming across the flat-topped roofs of nondescript office buildings than he had punching bad guys in the face.

Perhaps this lack of practical experience was why he currently found himself with his back to a wall, surrounded by eight hatchet-faced goons, regretting every choice that had led him to this particular moment. If only he was as practiced at sparring as he was at shimmying up drain pipes or adjusting the sights of his sniper rifle from a safe two or three buildings away, maybe he’d be doing a better job fighting his way out of what was now painfully and obviously a trap.

He should have known. At the time, when the tip had come in, he’d felt smug and self-assured. He’d left a gloating and insulting letter for his partner and walked into certain danger without a second thought. In retrospect, this had been a mistake. Another mistake had been the letter itself--Yuri was fairly certain it contained absolutely no information about his current location, just four references in three languages to pork products and a semi-pornographic sketch involving Yuuri and an outsized sausage link. There was no way he was going to be rescued. There was no way he’d be able to rescue himself. 

The circle of goons tightened around him. Yuri assessed his odds: he’d managed to disarm his assailants and that was in his favor. On the other hand, they were all a very burly species of henchmen and there were eight of them. They were looking rather more angry and alert than Yuri would have liked. If he could incapacitate one or two, maybe he’d be able to slip out and make a run for it. He was just beginning to send a prayer to whatever powers might be listening when the man directly to his left crumpled, collapsing onto the ground like a puppet with its strings suddenly cut.

In his place stood a somber-looking man with a trendy undercut, young but well-built. The shock of his sudden appearance rippled through the other combatants and the stranger used it to his advantage, striking out with a sudden attack that had two more henchmen on the ground in the space of a few moments. Yuri needed to take this opportunity to escape, or at least to get in a few hits of his own, but instead he found himself watching, breathless, as the stranger fought. His movements were exact and efficient. It was mesmerizing.

Yuri’s own fighting style was adapted to his small frame: evade and elude, strike from behind, never step close enough for your opponent to pin or grab you, rely on speed and agility but never assume superior strength. For all that the stranger had only an average build, his style was aggressive and direct. Every strike was compact, delivered at close range, with devastating effect. Yuri had often admired the fluidity and grace of martial arts, but at this moment he was struck by the brutal economy of the stranger’s movements.

A hand clawing at his arm for purchase jolted him back into the fight, and Yuri automatically rotated his arm at the shoulder to break the grip. He jerked the body next to him forward without turning, slamming his knee forcefully upward into the chest of his assailant. For a moment there was only the chaos of hard-scrabble fight, and then Yuri found himself back-to-back with the stranger, fighting in tandem. Shockingly, they fought well together--better even than Yuri did with his actual partner. Better than Yuri had ever fought alongside anyone. 

When the last combatant hit the ground, it took Yuri several seconds to register that the fight was over. He felt lightheaded with adrenaline, his breathing ragged and his heartbeat ringing in his ears. 

The stranger looked at him. Yuri felt like he should keep fighting, or at least interrogate this unknown person, but he couldn’t make any words come out. _Who are you? Why are you here?_

“We should get out of here,” the stranger said after a moment. We? What we! Yuri had come here alone and that was how he should exit, go back to headquarters and regroup.

“I know a place,” he said instead. The stranger nodded tightly and turned away. Yuri watched his retreat for a moment before his legs, without permission from his mind, dragged him forward too. He followed to the alley behind the warehouse where a motorbike was concealed behind a dumpster.

Yuri had played at flouting protocol before. It was part of his persona as a spy, a certain aloofness towards rules and regulations that earned him the nickname “Russian Punk” from Interpol. But he had never broken from procedure so entirely as he did in this moment, arms tight around the stranger’s waist, whispering in his ear the location of the only private thing he’d hoped to hold on to, secret from any foreign or domestic government. 

The roar of the bike’s engine moved them through Moscow’s streets in a labyrinth--a circular pattern in case they were being followed, and Yuri just held on, closed his eyes and tried not to think about all the ways this could go wrong. He was breaking rules even children know by heart: don’t follow a stranger to a second location. He was breaking the one rule he ever made for himself: don’t lead anyone to your grandfather’s apartment.

The night stretched out unbearably as they moved through streets that were achingly familiar to Yuri, now experiencing them from the unfamiliar vantage of a motorbike seat. By the time they reached the shabby concrete-and-brick building on the corner, Yuri felt like he'd spent fifty years on this awful bike. His muscles were cramped and he felt sweat collecting at his temples, no doubt transforming his hair into a rat’s nest. His arms were too used to being wrapped around his stranger's chest, and when he had to let go in order to step off the bike he felt cold, disoriented.

This building was somewhat isolated from the rest of the block by a dingy park and a half-demolished high rise, forever under construction. The apartment had been vacant since his grandfather’s disappearance, but Yuri had kept it, stubbornly and sentimentally. It had been in the family for as long as he could remember, the address one of the first numbers he ever memorized as a child.

They climbed three flights of stairs in stiff silence. Yuri wasn’t so in his head that he didn’t notice the increasingly labored breathing of his companion as they ascended. No one in this game--and from the deft way he’d fought, he was obviously no civilian--could ever be so out of shape that they’d be out of breath after a couple staircases. He must be injured. They’d shared a motorbike for miles and Yuri hadn’t felt any blood seeping on him, so he wasn’t hemorrhaging, although that didn’t mean it wasn’t serious.

Yuri ushered his guest inside. As he closed and locked the door behind them his shoulders tightened, a sudden rush of alert heat racing up his spine. He paused with his fingers on the deadlock. This was a monstrously bad idea--had always been a bad idea--but now every nerve ending sparked with the full knowledge of how much of a risk it was. Other teenagers could make terrible decisions with the excuse of an innocent belief in their own immortality; Yuri had been stripped of that belief long ago. All the ways that this situation could deteriorate played behind his eyes in gruesome detail.

He kept his breaths even through the rising panic. None of his alarm showed on his face as he turned coolly around to survey the other agent and the rest of the room. Yuri hadn’t been back in several years, but it hadn’t changed. There wasn’t even any dust--he paid a cleaning lady to come once a month. Despite his long absence, Yuri knew every square centimeter. He could float through each room blindfolded without bumping a single piece of furniture. That was probably the greatest advantage he’d have if things went sour. 

Yuri’s guest looked out of place in the center of the living room--alert without being obvious about it, his body oriented subtly towards the exits, just as Yuri was trained to do. There were a few exits the newcomer would miss. If Yuri wanted to end this right now, his best option would be to aim a blow at his ribs (an educated guess at where he was injured, judging from how he stood) and make for the hall closet, where the carpet concealed a trap door to the laundry chute. 

If Yuri intended to attack, he needed to do it right now or give up the notion of escape entirely. From the way the other agent observed him with wary attention, Yuri knew that he could probably sense Yuri’s reservations. Assuming that your enemy was more oblivious than you was a great way to get killed. Yuri gave him credit and assumed he was just as braced for this rendezvous to go badly as Yuri himself.

Their eyes met. Yuri inhaled steadily, and on the exhale admitted to himself that any window of opportunity to end this was gone. Leading a stranger to his grandfather’s apartment only to assault him and escape was many things, but above all it was stupid. Sticking to a course of action because you didn’t want to admit you’d been ridiculous was perhaps unprofessional, but Yuri couldn’t quite sacrifice his pride for his career. He was doing this.

He reached for the wall and flicked on the light, watching as the stranger’s eyelashes fluttered to adjust to the brightness.

“You can take a seat,” Yuri said, jerking his chin at the living room couch. “You want anything to drink? Water? Vodka?”

The stranger sat. “Are you legal to drink?”

“Are you in the mood to stay sober with those broken ribs?” The stranger winced, and Yuri knew he’d guessed right. He headed into the kitchen, feeling the stranger’s eyes on his back as he walked away, and grabbed vodka and an ice pack from the freezer. This place didn’t have a full set of dishes, but it did have shot glasses.

“Take off your shirt,” Yuri instructed as he sat down on the couch with his provisions. The stranger didn’t take off his shirt, lifting it up instead and holding out his hand for the ice pack.

Yuri put a shot of vodka in the man’s hand and kept the ice pack to himself. “I’ll ice it. You, drink.” 

The man seemed reluctant to be touched, leaning back when Yuri shifted forward with the ice. “I can do it for myself.”

Yuri glared. “Just let me. There’s tiger balm to apply, too, and you’ll make it worse for yourself if you move too much.” 

The man’s jaw set in a mulish expression, but then he was knocking back his vodka shot in one swallow, setting the glass on the table with a finality that seemed to signal acceptance of Yuri’s terms. He didn’t move away this time when Yuri leaned in. The whole side of his torso looked like hell, angry red and purpling already.

Yuri hadn’t ever actually treated an injury before, his or anyone else’s. Agency nurses usually swarmed him post-mission any time he’d gotten so much as a papercut in the field. He could feel himself wavering in hesitation now, and that pissed him off. He overcorrected his hesitation, gruffly shoving the ice pack under the edge of his stranger’s t-shirt. He knew it was too much pressure, and his patient confirmed this with a hissed inhale, followed by “ow.” Deadpan. Yuri’s glare intensified.

“Are you ever going to tell me who you are,” he asked. The stranger’s eyes flashed up at him, his expression tight, unreadable.

“I’m Otabek. We’ve met before,” he said. The look on his face was almost hostile. 

It was impossible that they had met before. Yuri would have remembered. Since the moment he’d first seen him grimly disabling henchmen with well-timed kicks to vulnerable kneecaps a few hours ago, Yuri had felt a spark of energy, undeniable and magnetic, between them. There was no way in hell he’d somehow met him before and simply forgotten.

Otabek. It could be a Russian name, but Yuri doubted it. With his coloring and looks, the faint traces of an accent, Kazakh seemed more likely. Kazakh intelligence was a small and poorly funded operation. The handful of spies they employed were frankly a bunch of thugs, all muscle and no finesse. Unlike Otabek, they were sort of forgettable--each an interchangeable combination of thick-necked muscle and humorless expressions. They all blurred together after a while. 

It was possible Yuri had fought Otabek during an altercation. If he had, no doubt he would have been more concerned with fleeing for his life than trying to get to know anyone. 

“We have,” was all Yuri ended up saying. It wasn’t quite a statement of fact but it also wasn’t a question. He adjusted the angle of the ice to be slightly less punishing, and felt it under his hands when Otabek’s breath stuttered. It sounded painful.

“Is that second glass just a prop?” Maybe the pain was responsible for the gruffness in Otabek’s voice, somehow even lower than it had been just a moment ago. Yuri needed to focus more of his awareness on his surroundings and less on Otabek’s breathing patterns and the timbre of his voice. 

He glanced over his shoulder at the vodka and two glasses on the coffee table. He wasn’t much of a drinker, but he didn’t want to make Otabek suspicious. 

“You’re in a hurry,” Yuri grumbled, but he kept one hand on the ice pack and poured himself a shot with the other, refilling Otabek’s glass as well. Was it just his imagination, or was Otabek eyeing the stretch of his torso as he leaned across the space between his seat and the table to pour?

The vodka was cold and sharp on his tongue. Otabek’s timing matched his, both of them shooting the whole glass and finishing in the same second. Yuri wasn’t sure if they’d done that on purpose or not. Otabek was already leaning past him to grab the bottle and keep it closer to hand, and Yuri slapped at his wrist.

“Don’t move, idiot. I’ll get it if you need the whole bottle.” Belatedly Yuri remembered that this was still a situation with someone whose loyalties were, at best, unclear, and he paused to see if Otabek took offense. . But Otabek’s soft snort of laughter came as Yuri made a grab for the vodka, so he didn’t seem to mind.

Otabek took a swig from the bottle as Yuri traded the ice pack for tiger balm. He winced as Yuri started rubbing the ointment into his skin. Yuri could feel muscles twitch under his fingers.

“Do you think your ribs are broken, or just bruised?” Yuri asked. There was a thin, short scar on Otabek’s stomach to the left of where the visible bruising ended. Probably the horizontal slash of a knife, a gut wound narrowly avoided. Otabek’s abs were clearly defined, also. Yuri shouldn't have had that shot.

“I don't know. I can't do much about it either way.” Yuri felt Otabek's eyes on him, and realized that his hand had stalled, resting lightly on bruised skin. He scooped more tiger balm out and resumed his work.

“You haven't told me your name.”

To his horror, Yuri felt his cheeks grow hot. Glaring down at Otabek’s ribs, he grabbed the ice pack again. He needed the shock of cold against his hand about as much as Otabek needed it for the pain. “Like you said, we've met before. Now you don't remember my name?”

Yuri heard the glug of liquid as Otabek took another swig from the bottle. “I’d know your eyes anywhere,” he said.

Yuri swallowed, his tongue as thick and clumsy as his cheeks were warm. “It’s Yuri,” he said, softly. When he looked up from the ice pack, he saw that Otabek was offering him the bottle. Yuri took it and drank without breaking eye contact. He hoped that Otabek didn't have any contagious diseases.

Yuri knew, now, that he was not imagining the way Otabek was looking at him.

“Here.” As Yuri watched, Otabek pulled his shirt the rest of the way off, letting it fall to the floor. “This is what you asked for, yes?”

In truth, the removal of his shirt didn't expose much more of the bruised area than simply lifting it had, but Yuri felt a surge of power seeing him bared. 

This was getting less and less subtle. “Don't hurt yourself. You shouldn't be moving your arms at all.”

Otabek rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. Yuri felt relieved and smug to see that his cheeks were tinged red, too. “Fine. I'll hold very still while you keep on poking and prodding and not helping.”

Yuri’s first instinct was indignation, but there was a sly undertone to Otabek’s words, as though Yuri was being intentionally provoked, or maybe challenged. He could guess what the challenge’s endgame might be.

What the hell. He didn't have much experience with the seduction side of espionage, but there was a first time for everything. Sex mostly came into play in the Hollywood version of his field rather than the reality, but it couldn't hurt to know his way around this sort of thing for the future. 

If it was unwise to go at it with someone he knew so little about, well. His options were limited in this line of work and Otabek at least wasn't actively trying to kill him.

“You don't think I'm helping?” Yuri no longer felt indignant. He eased up on the ice and reached forward with his other hand to skim his fingers over Otabek's collarbone. Otabek’s gaze flicked down to the touch. Yuri fought the urge to take his hand back, to pretend he wasn't doing anything. Otabek was the one who'd stripped off his clothing under a flimsy pretense, who'd eyefucked Yuri while handing him the bottle of vodka. Yuri was not the most ridiculous one here.

“You could be helping more,” Otabek said, blithe. Yuri rolled his eyes and pushed his thumb into a fleshy spot below Otabek’s shoulder where he'd seen one of the goons land a hit. Otabek hissed.

“I guess you must have high standards for personal care,” Yuri said, trying out a low voice. It sounded pretty bad to his ears but he tracked the movement of Otabek’s adam’s apple as he swallowed, hard.

“Maybe I just have high standards for you.” It should have sounded cheesy, or sarcastic, but Otabek said it like he said everything, matter of factly, like he meant it. Like he knew Yuri well enough to have specific expectations and hopes. 

Like he knew Yuri intimately. It was just a line, but Yuri found that his chest now felt strangely tight.

That was the touch of Otabek’s hand settling on his waist, curiously light and not grabby at all. Otabek's other hand moved to do something else, but Yuri stopped him. “I told you not to move.”

With two hands on either side of Otabek's shoulders, it felt natural to slide onto his waist and straddle him. Yuri was never clumsy, not even when his heartbeat hammered in the back of his throat. This was entirely uncharted territory. He took pride in his grace, especially since it made Otabek's eyes widen, like maybe he could be flustered after all. 

Otabek's hand on Yuri’s waist was more of a solid grip now, his fingers curving around Yuri’s side. He let his head fall back to look Yuri in the eye, and Yuri could see traces of stubble on his jawline.

“If I can't move, then I guess I'm at your mercy.” 

Yuri was starting to like Otabek's lines. He didn't really have any of his own to offer in return. He was too distracted by the warmth of Otabek’s thighs under his legs, and the smooth skin of neck and shoulders under his palms. Yuri’s verbal acuity mostly limited itself to insults and curse words, but he had neither on the tip of his tongue right now. 

“You are,” he said. Not exactly the height of banter. “What should I do with you?”

He leaned in as much as he dared, still leaving space between their faces. Mortifyingly, he found himself hesitant to close the distance for a kiss: he'd never done this before, which made it all too easy to imagine he'd fuck it up somehow, miss Otabek’s lips and end up with his nose half in his mouth or something. 

It didn't help that Otabek was staring at him, his eyes a dark forest to wander in. Hard to keep up a cool attitude under eyes like that. Yuri found himself staring back, his grip on Otabek tightening, wondering what kind of look was reflected in his own eyes. 

It was strange to have no doubt that this trash fire mission was going to end in sex, and yet be poised on the edge of that eventuality. The moment seemed to stretch into infinity because Yuri simply didn't want to close his eyes and move.

The outside world came to his rescue. An exceptionally loud engine revved down the block, gaining volume as it passed their corner before fading as it sped away. Someone yelled unintelligibly after it. Otabek glanced towards the sound, breaking eye contact and the strange spell he’d cast over Yuri.

Yuri threw himself into his first kiss the way he'd thrown himself into most other firsts in his life: heedless, angry at himself for feeling any hesitation before the plunge, determined to make up for any prior nervousness with blind ferocity. He managed to land on Otabek’s lips instead of his nose, at least, and if Otabek was at all surprised or repulsed by Yuri’s aggression he didn't show it. Instead Yuri was matched, pressure for pressure, teeth against lips and Otabek's hand on the small of his back pulling him in needy and hot.

Yuri remembered too late about the injured ribs, freezing only after he was already plastered against Otabek's side and moving against him. That was the stickiness of tiger balm residue against his shirt, and oh hell, he was going to contribute to a punctured lung in this poor guy’s chest.

“Fuck.” Yuri tried to inch backwards, “your ribs.” Otabek made a sound that could have been pain or could have been pleasure, but Yuri wasn’t about to flatter himself: probably pain.

“It’s fine,” Otabek said, a clear lie. His eyes were pinched at the edges, his teeth clenched. Yuri eased further back as gently as he could.

“Perhaps we should lie down.” And perhaps Yuri should get off his lap. Yuri was a piss-poor nursemaid apparently, because he didn’t want to do that. The skin of Otabek’s shoulders under his palms felt warm and somehow mysterious and new, as if Yuri himself didn’t also have shoulders and warm skin. Had his heartrate sped up just now because he was thinking about shoulders?

“I am not tired.” Yuri had known Otabek for only a few hours, but he could already sense a well of stubbornness, quite clear in his jawline and the strength of his stare. And there was still that hand on his back, where Yuri could feel the press of each finger, distracting and hot.

“Did you hear me say anything about sleep?” Yuri found within himself the ability to take his hands off Otabek’s shoulders and stand. The absence of those five fingers against his back shouldn’t be disorienting, and yet. He stretched out a hand, which Otabek simply looked at for several slow seconds before taking.

Yuri pulled him upright, and briefly they were chest-to-chest, the momentum of Yuri’s helping hand making Otabek list forward, swaying into Yuri’s personal space before settling back on his heels. It must have been deliberate; Yuri had seen something of Otabek’s agility and you couldn’t move like that without exceptional balance. Yuri looked up and felt very conscious of having to look up, just a bit, in order to meet Otabek’s eyes.

“Bedroom’s this way,” he said, throat dry. Otabek hadn’t let go of his hand, and Yuri squeezed his fingers as he led the way. It couldn’t have been more than ten steps between the end of the couch and the start of the bed but it felt like the distance from one stage wing to the next, a whole threshold crossed.

They laid down together. Yuri kissed him with more caution this time, keeping himself demurely propped up on an elbow instead of rushing into full-body contact. There was less urgency, but Yuri still found himself spiraling down into these kisses, drifting from his sense of time and his spatial awareness. Otabek had a habit of releasing short, soft sighs whenever they paused, and his hands were in Yuri’s hair and also everywhere else--a thumb on the back of his neck, fingertips skating over collarbone, a palm lingering cupped around a hip. Yuri tried to keep his own touches limited to the neck up, not wanting to disturb any ribs, but he was dimly aware of his lower half drifting forward without his permission. His hips moved against Otabek’s thigh and one ankle was intertwined with Otabek’s feet, his toes curling against a calf muscle.

They removed clothing, but it felt lazy and almost amusing, more for curiosity’s sake than with any end goal. In the darkness of the unlit room, he could see only an artist’s impression of Otabek’s form, his body shadowy and indistinct in the pauses between kisses. 

Eventually they both began to slow, the moments between lips meeting again longer and longer, movements stilling. Yuri thought sleepily of his earlier conviction that tonight would end in sex, a prediction that had seemed set in stone. The probability that he would never see Otabek again after tonight was absurdly high. It was now or never, wasn’t it? 

But it was difficult to hold on to urgency right now, with moonlight lancing through the window and pillows beneath their heads, the whole world gone soft and nonthreatening. Surely the night could be suspended, time stopped, if they chose. Surely Yuri could fall asleep here, his cheek resting on Otabek’s naked chest, and wake up again having lost no seconds nor minutes nor hours nor opportunities. Dream logic had already claimed him before his eyes shut. 

***

Yuri woke up disoriented. Everything felt so comically wrong that for a moment he thought he was still dreaming: he was on the wrong side of the bed, the light from the window streamed in from an unexpected direction, and the blanket covering his lower half was a relic from his childhood. The room even smelled off: musty and stale. It was stiflingly hot and he heard the faint clanking of a radiator.

Otabek still slept beside him, but his breathing was shallow, as though he could wake at any moment. Images from the night before rushed back into Yuri’s mind, making him blush. Not because they’d almost fucked, but because they hadn’t. It had been unexpectedly tender. It was embarrassing to confront in the light of day: how Yuri had been so delicately careful of Otabek’s bruised ribs, and how Otabek had just been careful. He'd touched Yuri with the same purpose and efficiency that he'd used to incapacitate bad guys, but the touch had been intimate, sweet. Just as in the fight it had been shockingly elegant for all that it was utilitarian.

Watching Otabek sleep, Yuri became aroused, but it was a sour feeling mixed with a churning anger. He felt hot all over, burning with energy. He wanted to shake Otabek awake and yell in his face, slap him, prod him, force him to make noise. He’d already been absent from headquarters too long and he didn't have time to laze about in bed with mysterious lovers. He had to leave before this feeling became something even more terrible.

Anger had always been for Yuri a default emotion. Before he was recruited into espionage, Yuri had trained from a young age in the ballet. There had been an understanding, unspoken but very real, that he would have a fine professional career, join the Moscow ballet and ascend to the rank of principal. He would dance Siegfried in Swan Lake and Basilio in Don Quixote. 

The truth is that Yuri cannot remember a time in his life when he didn't have work, a career. He had always labored.

He’d been a talented and expressive dancer, but ballet was not an occupation where native talent would ever be enough. He had pushed himself. His earliest memories are hazy red, muscles screaming as he worked through pain and blisters and tears. He never rested. Something volatile seethed within him and he used it.

Later, when he had things to truly make him angry, this propensity to burning rage had come in handy.

“You are awake.” Otabek’s voice cut through his thoughts. His eyes were still closed, as though asleep, and his posture relaxed.

“It's morning. What, I'm supposed to sleep until noon.” Yuri’s voice sounded petulant to his own ears. It was silent for a few moments before Otabek spoke again.

“This is not a safe house,” he said. 

It wasn’t, in fact. It was Yuri’s childhood bedroom. He looked around the small room and tried to see it through a stranger’s eyes. It was bare, but there were obvious signs it had once been lived in, personalized. The wall opposite the bed was spotted yellow from the adhesives of scotch tape, gone hard and brittle over time, that had once held up posters. The closet door stood open, revealing a miscellany of hangers, plastic and wire, huddled to one side. Yuri was embarrassed to note that not a few had paper wrappers emblazoned with the symbol of the dry cleaner three blocks east where Yuri’s dance costumes used to be sent for laundering. It was the kind of small detail that any novice spy could use to unravel Yuri’s entire life story. 

Yuri stretched, arching his back in what he hoped was an enticing fashion. He glanced over at Otabek.

“You don’t feel safe with me, Beka?” Otabek’s eyes tightened at the nickname, but his mouth quirked with something like affection. He turned towards Yuri and placed his hand low on Yuri’s stomach, a half embrace. Yuri looked down at the hand: clean nails neatly filed, long fingers relaxed against the wiry golden hairs below his belly button. Yuri was suddenly painfully aware that they were both completely naked.

Yuri had never in his life experienced even a shadow of shame at nudity, his or anyone else’s. He’d spent too much time in communal changing rooms--a childhood in the overheated dance studios of Moscow and an adolescence shucking off ridiculous disguises in the coat check rooms of embassy buildings while the dispassionate voice of a technical analyst rattled off escape routes through his earpiece. Modesty had never factored into this sort of life.

But now, humiliation blossomed in his cheeks, spread down the length of his neck, burned across his bare chest in angry blotches all the way to his stomach, where Otabek’s hand still rested. It didn’t help that although Otabek, too, was naked, his lower half was still artfully covered by the sheet, the way Yuri assumed only happened in movies. He looked like he should be in a movie. Yuri probably looked as though a family of angry sparrows had taken up residence in his hair. He felt himself tense.

“You seem perfectly at home to me,” Yuri spat. If Otabek was taken aback by the sudden venom in Yuri’s voice, he didn’t show it. He merely shrugged, removed his hand, and lay back against his pillow.

“Your partner will have noted your absence,” he said. It needled at Yuri that Otabek said everything like a statement of fact, never a question. Like he knew everything about Yuri already. It made Yuri want to shout contradictions at him, which probably meant it was something Otabek did intentionally, an interrogation technique. 

Still, Yuri couldn’t stop himself from saying, “That shithead has probably forgotten about me already.”

Otabek locked eyes with him. 

“You are not forgettable, Yuri. You do not let yourself be forgotten.”

Yuri laughed, an ugly sound. “My partner only thinks of himself, his little dog, and Viktor--”

He stopped himself talking. What was wrong with him? He was doing a shitty job withholding details. He sounded like a jealous child to his own ears, but it was hard to stay silent. He wanted Otabek to understand him, though he wasn’t sure why it felt so urgent.

“I used to be a ballet dancer,” he said, to change the subject. “I was very good. Unforgettable. But I was too small to play the men’s roles. Everyone hoped I would hit a growth spurt so that I could do lifts, dance the pas de deux. I stopped dancing when I was fourteen. I was only 160 centimeters tall and I’ve only grown five centimeters since then. I would probably never have made it in a traditional company.”

Otabek said nothing, and finally Yuri turned, curling into his side and laying his head on Otabek’s chest.

“Now it is your turn. You have to tell me something about you.”

For a while Yuri thought Otabek wouldn’t speak, but eventually he did, voice low and gravelly.

“I was also small at fourteen,” he said.

“But you grew?”

Otabek nodded. “There was an empty lot a few blocks from our apartment in Almaty where the neighborhood kids used to play. I was afraid to go there because I heard that sometimes the bigger boys would beat you up, to see if you were tough enough. I had never been in a fight. I didn’t have friends, then.”

“You’ve changed since then,” Yuri said. “You learned to fight.” Otabek nodded. “And you have friends, now.”

Yuri felt Otabek’s hand find his, lacing their fingers together. He looked at Yuri with hard eyes.

“Yes, I think I have a friend now.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rating has gone up! I'm very excited about this.  
> As usual, thank you to marbleflan for the assistance and encouragement.
> 
> *
> 
> From now on I have no power over my heart.  
> I know where the heart lives in others.  
> It is in the breast—as everyone knows!  
> But in me though  
> anatomy went mad.  
> An all-encompassing heart—  
> booms everywhere.
> 
>    
>  _-Vladimir Mayakovsky, "I Love"_

He knew he was fucked before he’d made it barely three steps inside K.A.T.S.U.D.O.N. headquarters.The first clue was that he was sent to Yakov’s office instead of Viktor’s. Viktor had nominally the same rank as Yakov, and he was Yuri’s direct report, but everyone knew that when you truly screwed yourself Yakov was the one who would make sure you felt the enormity of your crimes. In painful detail.The second clue was Yuri’s note. It sat on Yakov’s desk, enclosed in a little plastic sleeve, bagged and tagged evidence of his gross misdeeds and bad taste. It had seemed a good joke when he’d scribbled it yesterday, but now it leered up at him, embarrasingly juvenile. 

Yuri threw himself into a chair with exaggerated force, slumping down and spreading his knees wide, every inch the uncaring, insouciant punk with nothing but contempt for authority. Yakov’s face, never exactly cheerful, was so severe he looked like a tombstone: here lies Yuri Plisetsky, that fucking shithead who dug his own grave.

“Care to explain this to me?” Yakov scooted the envelope across his desk towards Yuri. Yuri leaned forward, eyebrows lifted as though seeing it for the first time. His sketching skills weren’t all that bad. He pointed at a section near the bottom.

“Well this is a Japanese phrase. I guess it loses something in translation but roughly it’s like a stuffed porkchop--” Yakov cut him off with a severe slice of his hand through the air.

“You log an encrypted message, disappear without telling anyone your location, don’t check in with your partner, no word to your superior, no word to ME, and now I’m getting reports you were nearly killed during an ambush.” Yakov’s puffed up face resembled a steamed pork bun. Yuri made a mental note of the insult for later.

“Who is reporting on me?” He slouched back in his chair with a sniff. It had probably been Yuuri, that little toad, snitching behind his back. 

Yakov seized the note in his hand and shook it in Yuri’s face. It took a lot not to knock Yakov’s hand away. Yuri felt his anger from the morning returning and had to turn his head to keep himself from moving. 

Yakov’s voice was grim. “Not ever again, Yuri. You report in. You find your partner. You go on sanctioned missions with back up.”

“Or else,” Yuri sneered.

“There is no or else. You will do this. There are no other paths for you, Yurachka.” Yuri didn’t know if the endearment was meant to soften Yakov’s harsh words, or sharpen the blade, but he felt cut down. 

Yuri had always felt comfortable with Yakov, more comfortable than with Viktor, although Viktor was more of a peer to him. But Yuri had spent his life in the company of old men--his grandfather and his grandfather’s equally advanced friends. Though they looked nothing alike, Yakov and Yuri’s grandfather shared those similarities that all older men near in age share, worn and hard in the same characteristic grooves. 

Yakov turned away from him and began straightening the papers on his desk. “What are you still doing here?” he tossed over his shoulder. “Get out of my office. Go find your useless partner.”

Yuri rose, wordlessly, and slipped out the office door.

***

He went to look for his partner in the canteen. It was midday and full. He quickly spotted Yuuri, sitting alone in a corner like a dumbfuck as he often did, but his eyes got caught on the back of someone else’s head, sporting a familiar undercut. Yuri’s heart nearly stopped and his feet moved of their own volition until he stood directly behind the person. It wasn’t until the man threw his head back in a booming laugh that Yuri realized it was not Otabek, incongruously seated at a lunch table with Yuri’s coworkers, but JJ. He was telling a joke in his thickly accented Russian and the rest of the table laughed along with him good-naturedly, though the punch line had been an untranslatable French word that only half of them would have understood.

“Yuri! Back from the dead I hear,” JJ said when he noticed Yuri standing behind him. 

“That’s right,” Mila chimed in from across the table, “word on the street is that you had some kind of shake down and barely made it out alive. Thought we were going to have to scrape you off a sidewalk with a trowel or something.”

Yuri rolled his eyes. It wasn’t surprising that word of his run in with yesterday’s goons had already gotten around. Spies were the worst kinds of gossips: the kind who were stupidly good at finding out things they shouldn’t know.

“Put your trowel away. You know how skilled I am, I’m not going to be gunned down by lackeys in a warehouse.” Yuri tossed his hair for emphasis.

“I don’t know about that,” Mila said with a sneer, “if you’re such a hot shot, why’d you crawl back here lookling like you spent last night sleeping in a dumpster?” 

“Yeah, kind of a dead giveaway that you got yourself up shit creek,” JJ said, with a crappy copy of Mila’s sneer.

Yuri flushed. He hadn’t showered or changed. Normally JJ’s negative opinion was a good indicator that he was doing something right, but he was acutely aware of the griminess of his day-old clothes. He ran a hand through his tangled hair.

“I’m not up to my usual standard, but it’s nothing a good brushing won’t fix.”

“Your hair is getting long,” Yuuko said. “Maybe it’s time for a cut.”

“I should have Georgi’s girlfriend buzz it all off, like she does for him.” Georgi’s terrible haircuts were the subject of frequent derision around headquarters. They were inflicted on him by his girlfriend Anya, who worked at the Czech satellite and had supposedly been a beautician before she turned spy. She also sometimes did his make up with equally disastrous results. But now to Yuri’s surprise, no one laughed, and Georgi glared at him with a look of such potent hostility Yuri thought he might launch himself across the lunch table to throttle him on the spot. 

Georgi stoodand jerked his tray off of the table, his chair clattering over in the process, and stalked away without another word. Everyone looked embarrassed, for Georgi or for Yuri, Yuri wasn’t sure.

“They broke up,” Yuuko stage-whispered. “Well, she broke up with him. He isn’t taking it too well.”

“When did that happen?”

“Weeks ago, Yuri.” 

Mila laughed, shrilly, “Honestly, some hotshot. You can’t even keep up with canteen gossip.”

Yuri sniffed. “My indifference to all this,” he waved his hand in a lazy circle, “is why I am the most effective spy this two-bit organization has ever employed. I don’t get distracted. I have focus.” 

He tossed his head again, looking around as Mila rolled her eyes, hoping he looked more indifferent than he felt. He usually had a thicker skin for Mila’s taunts. He hated to think what any of them would be saying if they knew that a trowel would’ve been necessary without Otabek’s rescue. “Anyway, I came in looking for Yuuri, not to waste time with you shitheads.”

“Well focus your attention right behind you--you passed him on your way in,” Mila said. She made an infuriating little scurrying motion with the fingers of her right hand. “Go on, little Yurio.”

No one ever called Yuri “Yurio” before Katsuki Yuuri appeared in his life. They had been partners for about six months now, and Yuri counted it as one of the most painful experiences of his life--and that included the time he fell from a three story building and shattered his left elbow. He’d thought nothing could surpass the trauma of enduring two reconstructive surgeries, months of excruciating physical therapy, and hours of torturous foreign language tutoring while he waited to be cleared for field work, but Yuuri had managed to bring him to a new low. 

Before he left Japan, Yuuri had been a top agent doing deep undercover work. Then one day for no discernable reason, he flubbed a mission. Things went spectacularly wrong: his entire unit was exposed and Yuuri himself was captured and beaten within an inch of his life before an extraction team could get him out. At first it had been assumed that something had been done to him, but in the end his only explanation for the fiasco was that he had been nervous. What kind of fucking spy gets nervous.

And then they’d assigned him to Yuri for a partner. Yuri had never had a partner before--he’d worked two or three man missions, but rarely with the same agents twice. And the first partner they pushed on him was a wash-out with anxiety issues. Horrible. 

The worst part was that Yuuri wasn’t a terrible spy. Yuri had worked one mission with him in the past--a sneak-and-grab at a hotel with ties to known government money launderers. They’d snuck in among a party of wedding guests through the banquet hall. Yuuri had been flawless: a boisterous guest dancing drunkenly when they needed a distraction, a stealthy lockpick when they needed a swift escape, a skilled combatant when they needed to drop three heavily armed guards without making a sound. Yuuri could go from winningly naive to saucy and seductive at the drop of a hat.

It made it more pathetic that he’d crumbled when it really mattered. And now Yuri was stuck with him. Since they’d been partnered up, Yuuri had acted differently. Nervous, apologetic. Also professional, and if Yuri was forced to admit it, painstakingly reliable. But it was hard to be around him and not feel like Yuri’s own performance had earned him a partner in such disgrace--even if that partner had saved his ass not a few times by now.

Yuri flipped Mila the bird on automatic and turned on his heel, moving towards the table in the far corner where Yuuri sat, head bent low over a map. Yuri gave no warning before throwing his body into the opposite seat, but to his disappointment Yuuri didn’t jump in surprise, just glanced up through the edge of his bangs, the canteen light glinting off his glasses and turning them opaque for a moment.

“You’re back,” Yuuri said. The mildness in his voice was maddening. Yuri leaned forward over the table with as much hostility and menace as he could bring to bear while wearing clothes that were a soiled, sweaty reminder that he’d been beaten up yesterday. He placed his elbows on the map Yuuri had been looking at, crinkling the pages. Yuuri’s eyebrows twitched out of his serene expression and into something more like a frown.

“You’re a snitch,” Yuri said. 

Yuuri’s head cocked to the side. “We’re spies. Snitching on people is the one thing we’re paid to do above all else.” 

“Fuck off with that!” Yuuri had the audacity to look at him like a babysitter weathering a temper tantrum. It was not the first time he had received this look from his partner. It was bullshit. If anyone was the babysitter in this partnership, it was Yuri, whose promising career had been interrupted by this failure of an agent, pawned off on him to look after and rehabilitate.

He wanted to sweep the stupid map off the table, but he didn’t want more of Yuuri’s faux-mature disapproval. He was keenly aware of the knowing glances coming from the agents sitting around them. He reined himself in, nostrils flaring as he slumped back in his seat, petulantly flicking the edges of the map he’d marred. “Whatever. You didn’t have to turn in the note.”

Yuuri’s eyebrows shot up, arching above the frame of his glasses. “You disappeared and left no indication of where you’d gone, how long your mission might take, or what kind of situation you expected to find. I decided to appeal to command hierarchy. What was I supposed to do?”

Yuri ignored the sharp undertone of Yuuri’s levelheaded calm and sneered, crossing his arms over his chest. “Aw, were you worried about me? You couldn’t handle hunting down one teenaged corpse in all of Moscow? Did you cry? I can just picture you waiting by the window, wringing your hands like some _sel'skaya baba_ waiting on her son. ”

Each muscle in Yuuri’s face tightened almost imperceptibly: the corners of his mouth turned down, the line of his jaw turned austere, the subtle crows’ feet that Yuri had been quick to point out the first day they’d met deepened. 

“Would it be such a surprise if I’d cried?” Yuuri leaned forward, more intent than Yuri had ever seen him. “I’ve been in the field for five years and I haven’t lost a partner, not yet. Have you?” 

Despite himself, Yuri shrank back under that stare, surprised enough to prevent his guilt and shame from alchemizing immediately into anger. “No,” he said, the word bitten off and spat out like a cat resentfully releasing a pet bird post-reprimand. 

Yuuri had a seemingly endless capacity to surprise Yuri and keep him off-balance. His acceptance of his own vulnerabilities, of his mistakes and his lack of confidence, never failed to astonish, never became something that Yuri could account for or see coming. It was the aspect of this partnership that Yuri disliked most. What was he supposed to do with Yuuri admitting that he’d been worried enough about Yuri to possibly cry about it? What the fuck. All he could do was sit here awkwardly and avoid eye contact and feel bad. 

_Really_ bad. Yuri considered that while he’d been groping some stranger in the dark, Yuuri had been anxious to the point of tears over his possible demise. He felt more uncomfortable than he had during all of Yakov’s ranting. Yuri swallowed, painfully aware now of the grit behind his eyelids, the grease in his hair, the dried sweat on his clothes. He needed to shower and change and put this whole series of bad decisions behind him.

“What’s this bullshit anyway,” Yuri gestured at the map. They were wrinkled from where he’d been leaning on them and a little dirty, the way all objects exposed to the dubious surfaces of the cafeteria inevitably were. 

Yuuri pointed to an X marking a block near the railway station, then trailed his fingers slowly to another X a few inches over, then another. “These are all places where agents have been unexpectedly ambushed over the last few weeks.” Yuuri poked at the map, “this one is you.”

Yuri stared down at the little crisscrossed blue lines indicating an intersection. It looked very remote and abstract on the two-dimensional surface. Nothing like the experience, which was still bright and visceral in his mind. He felt an echoing ache of getting jabbed in the ribs and had to will himself not to wince. Ambushed. He’d heard there had been some incidents with other agents but of course none of them had been alone, unprotected. 

Yuuri was looking up at him expectantly, like he thought they were about to have some kind of heart to heart about Yuri’s suicidal mission. 

“Well, what the fuck is going on,” he said irritably. Yuuri looked away.

“I guess we’ll find out.”

****

Yuri was in fact quite young, but he felt ancient some days. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t lain awake at night in his bed feeling his body like a separate thing: a painful suit he had shrugged into and now could not take off. He remembered his grandfather drawing him warm baths, trying to draw the aches from his bones, loosen the tight knots that plagued his muscles. Ballet was hard on his body, training to be a spy even harder. Pain had always been a part of him, and it was sinking now into his very heart.

Spies were, as a rule, a fairly broken sort of people. Even in the few short years he’d worked for the agency, he’d seen the changes come over his comrades: JJ’s sparkling narcissism became a bitter flame, behind Viktor’s teasing eyes lurked boredom and resignation, Mila’s sharp sarcasm grew ever more brittle and threatened to bite. Seung-gil had always been a fucking jerk, but his blank stares sometimes suggested disassociation, like he didn’t even register other people in the room. 

Yuri wondered how he had changed, what he was losing every time he put on another mask and treated his body like an instrument instead of something he had to live in, live with, until the end of his days.

He knew at least part of the hopelessness that hung around them resulted from their growing sense that collectively they had no future to speak of. They worked for no government, had no safety net from any recognized organization. There would be no pension, no retirement. They would work until they could work no more. They were, when it came down to it, little better than insurgents. If they lived long enough, they might see this corrupt regime tumble. If they were very lucky, they’d die before it was replaced with another, equally corrupt. Yuri felt old, and given the likelihood that he would die young, he had probably reached near enough to the end point that he should make every moment count, every experience bristle with meaning and sensation and magnitude.

He needed to get fucking laid.

So, was it really so surprising that when his cell phone--the purportedly untouchable one issued to him by the Knowledge and Tactical Science Unified Departments of Organized Nations with the express promise that it was as secure as shouting into a hole in the ground--chirped with a new message, which of course looked to be from Otabek, his first response was not to launch into high-key alert that he’d somehow further compromised himself? No, instead, he felt an overwhelming throb of desire so intense it left him lightheaded. He was fucked. 

_I want to see you again._ That was the message. He could almost hear it in his mind, Otabek’s deep voice. He felt it along his skin, like a whisper. It had been barely three days since his disastrous attempt at a solo mission. Three days since he’d woken up next to Otabek, three days since they’d touched. The thought of touching him again shuddered through his body. It was such a monumentally bad idea to respond, and yet he tapped out _yes when_ without even thinking. 

A little bubble of ellipses appeared and then he really did begin to think. His mind raced with possibilities. An anonymous motel room with stiff sheets, reeking of chemicals, Otabek underneath him blazing with purpose. A luxurious hotel in the old part of the city, with a balcony overlooking the green interruption of a city park--he could emerge from a steamy shower and toss off his robe, climb into bed deliciously nude. An empty subway train car at midnight, flickering lights as the stations passed them by throwing their restless shadows against the dirty windows as they wrestled each other. A crowded discotheque with a slumlord overseer, its patrons obliviously dancing in intoxicated ignorance, Yuri and Otabek shoving past the dance floor to a bathroom stall with a broken door, Yuri sinking to his knees. Fantasies, each more ludicrous and unlikely, clogged his mind as he waited for Otabek to respond. 

_I can meet you at the same apartment tomorrow night._ His fantasies had entirely skipped over the possibility of returning to the apartment, but once Otabek suggested it, it seemed the obvious choice. 

It took no time at all to hash out logistics. Yuri was never one to care for small talk or conversation for its own sake, but he found himself lingering with his phone still in hand long after there was nothing left to say. This exchange was the only contact with Otabek he’d have until tomorrow night, and he wanted it to be more, needed more of whatever connection this was to hold him over; the fantasies and silly daydreams weren’t enough.

But what could he do, text Otabek and ask him how his day had gone, or ask what his favorite movie was? Yuri couldn’t pretend they’d met through some other profession, couldn’t stand the thought of playacting at normalcy as if he didn’t know that Otabek’s days involved the same violence and deceit as his own. 

How the hell would Otabek respond to that sort of thing, anyway. He could not imagine Otabek--either the version of him that had saved Yuri’s ass by sending all those thugs to the hospital or the grave, or the version that stripped off his shirt and chugged vodka and let Yuri rub tiger balm over his ribs while staring with unapologetic desire--keeping up a frivolous text conversation with a romantic interest, exchanging emojis or conveying textual laughter. The image couldn’t even be conjured, it was impossible. 

He shoved his phone back in his pocket without sending anything additional, angry at himself and a little angry at Otabek too. Angry that Otabek had suggested tomorrow night and not right now. Angry that if right now had been requested, Yuri probably would’ve followed the call of his hormones and ditched this briefing, once again breaking rules without any point to it, a rebel with the stupidest cause imaginable.

Yuri was no stranger to seduction, but he had never experienced his own desire so strongly. To want and be wanted, it was too much. No Hollywood spy would fret over a text message to a sweetheart, but just the thought of Otabek reading his words made his head feel fuzzy.

Across the room, further back from the podium where one of K.A.T.S.U.D.O.N.’S CIA liaisons was providing an endless dry history of this particular crime ring, Viktor had been watching him. When Yuri made eye contact, Viktor gave him a sly grin and a wink, like he knew exactly what Yuri had been doing on his phone.

What the fuck did Viktor know? He always acted like this, like the private details of Yuri’s life were some kind of in-joke they shared, as if Yuri had ever asked him to butt into anything. As if he knew all there was to know about Yuri’s personal life, not content with the professional, just because he was sort of Yuri's boss.

There was no way he knew who Yuri was texting or why, he was just being an asshole. Yuri glared and flipped him off, angled subtly so that the lecturer wouldn't see. Viktor just grinned wider.

***

Yuri had hoped to be fashionably late to the rendezvous, but Moscow’s buses betrayed him by running on time for once, and there’d been little traffic. He was ten minutes early. He thought about taking a walk around the block, but that seemed foolish, and he didn’t know from which direction Otabek would be arriving--he disliked the thought of Otabek seeing him walk in an aimless circle and guessing the reason why.

So he leaned against the wall next to the front steps and waited. It was an unseasonably cold night for the end of the summer, like the winter frost was impatient for its turn. Yuri wasn’t dressed for the cold, but he rarely did. His days off were rare, so when he could dress as a civilian it took sub-zero temperatures to force him to concede to practicality over fashion.

By the time he heard the rumble of a motorbike, he’d scrolled through anything interesting on his phone and a hyperactive anxiety had worked its way through all his muscles, traveling from his toes up through his pelvis and radiating from his shoulders outward, his hands balled into fists in the pockets of his hoodie. He looked at Otabek, who wore black denim and a brown leather jacket but somehow managed to make unremarkable clothes look dangerous, and could not imagine that he could speak right now without his voice coming out as a squawk. 

Yuri dug his fingernails into the flesh of his palm as hard as he could, willing these nerves to go away. Everything he felt was nonsensical, without reason: this wasn’t a date, not like other kids his age went on dates. There was no mystery to how the night would go--Yuri knew that Otabek wanted him, knew why Otabek had texted him. There was no potential here for anything other than efficient physicality, the mission parameters could not change or expand. 

“You have helmet hair,” Yuri said. At least his voice had come out relatively normal and not at an absurdly high pitch. 

Otabek shrugged. “Yeah, probably.” He glanced around, and Yuri felt stung that, unlike himself, Otabek was apparently not so distracted that he didn’t remember to be as watchful as their profession dictated. “Are you going to invite me in?”

Yuri snorted and pushed off from the wall. He deliberately didn’t block the keypad as he punched in the door code even though there was still enough light for anyone to make out the numbers, just in case Otabek thought he’d scored some kind of key to any kingdom because Yuri had shared this place with him. 

“After you,” he said, waving Otabek in. Otabek walked in front of him up the stairs without hesitation, signalling either a complete trust in Yuri or a complete disregard for Yuri’s abilities. Yuri glared at his back but his gaze slid down, taking in the wrinkles and creases of Otabek’s weathered jacket, then his sensible belt, then the shape of his ass. His jeans were somewhat form-fitting, but not as revealing as, say, a dancer’s tights or the black leggings Yuri preferred to wear for breaking and entering. It really didn’t provide much to look at, but Yuri was looking anyway, thinking about Otabek’s narrow waist and the strength in his thighs.

Otabek asked him a question but Yuri was distracted and missed most of it distracted. He looked up, his stomach squirming. They’d reached the third floor and Otabek had stopped with his foot on the final step, glancing down at Yuri with raised eyebrows. 

“What!” Had Yuri ever been less cool in his entire life? The bark of his voice rang out ugly and loud in the hallway, and he felt helpless to control either his bristling or his blush.

“I said, ‘I hope the rest of your week was good.’” Otabek’s voice was as measured as Yuri’s was hostile, and Yuri couldn’t tell what he might be feeling: annoyed, insulted? Taken aback? Then Yuri saw Otabek’s front teeth press into his bottom lip, and realized that it was worse than all that--Otabek was holding back laughter.

“It was fine, all right? Whatever.” Yuri pushed past Otabek, jostling him to unlock the door to the apartment and turning around to glare once they’d shuffled inside. “What about you, huh? How are your ribs, tough guy?” He jabbed at Otabek’s chest for emphasis, then immediately felt awful when Otabek winced.

“Definitely fractured,” Otabek said. He took a step closer, a move that seemed baffling to Yuri. Why would you move closer to an embarrassing asshole who liked prodding your broken bones just because? “Are you okay? You seem nervous.”

Yuri stared at Otabek’s mouth, right at his eye level, and tried to suppress the urge to bolt. This was going all wrong. He couldn’t admit to being nervous, but he didn’t know what else to say. 

“What can I do to make you more comfortable?” The words were spoken sincerely, without any kind of flirtatious undertone, and somehow much harder on Yuri for all that. Otabek’s hand, coming up to tuck Yuri’s hair behind his ear, was quite another thing. Now Yuri _really_ couldn’t look at him. He would never look at anyone again, because he was going to melt into this floor.

“Why were you riding your motorbike with broken ribs?” he said, muttering it somewhere in the vicinity of Otabek’s shoulder. Otabek’s hand still lingered in his hair, now brushing Yuri’s arm as he lowered it to his side.

 

“I wanted to see you. It didn’t hurt that much.” 

Yuri waited for Otabek to do something else, to touch Yuri in some other way or continue moving in towards him until they were embracing. But Otabek stood still, his breaths the occasional whisper against Yuri’s bangs. Yuri knew he was waiting on him, knew that he should get his shit together and say something or make a move or at the very least look up. He felt unable to do any of that.

Eventually Otabek must have gotten bored of this standing waiting game, because he spoke again. “I’m not the best of patients when I’m sick or injured. I hate just lying around at home and waiting to get better. I tend to push myself, and then get scolded by doctors. Riding my bike is not the stupidest thing I’ve done with broken ribs.”

Yuri licked his lips and looked up at last, meeting Otabek’s eyes. “I’m the same. I hate feeling like an invalid.” 

“Yes. It’s hard to picture you willingly staying still.” The corner of Otabek’s mouth twitched up, and Yuri was beginning to feel more normal, the furious strange panic that had seized him on the stairs draining away. He smiled up at Otabek. Otabek’s breath hitched when he did so.

“I’m not nervous, okay? I invited you here. I wouldn’t have let you in if I wasn’t prepared.”

“Prepared, huh.” Now there was more of a teasing edge to Otabek’s words, but Yuri could do this. He steadied himself through his blush, a reaction which apparently just couldn’t be helped, maintained eye contact and broadened his smile until it showed teeth.

“Are you?” 

“Probably not. You’re a lot to prepare for.” Otabek’s hand was in his hair again, tangling into the strands this time, drawing Yuri in. Yuri went with it, pushing up on his toes and letting his arms drape over Otabek’s neck. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Yuri griped, although he couldn’t find it in himself to even play at being insulted. Otabek’s eyes held an amused warmth, and it seemed faintly ridiculous to Yuri that their noses touched before their lips met. Also ridiculous: staring into someone’s eyes from up this close, being able to smell Otabek’s cologne and recognizing it as a cheap scent he disliked generally yet for some reason appreciated now. Yuri felt disbelieving laughter tickle his throat but it died with Otabek’s tongue in his mouth.

The kiss was such a relief, like the first note on a violin, plucked after the tightening and tuning of each string. Yuri was the violin; the kiss resonated across his entire body. Otabek gripped him close and Yuri pressed into him, pressed up and forward until Otabek stumbled back. There was a wall there, good. 

A lurid impulse sparked in his mind, an image of himself sliding to his knees. Never mind that Yuri had never done anything like that before--all the embarrassing ways he might screw up his first attempt at oral sex seemed dismissable, inconsequential when compared with his desire to see how Otabek might react. 

The reward was immediate: when he dropped down to the floor Otabek’s next inhale became a sharp gasp, and he reached out to gripYuri’s shoulders like he needed to steady himself. When Yuri peered up at his face, Otabek looked a little confused and a lot turned on, staring down with parted lips and red cheeks.

“What are you--?”

“I thought it was obvious.” Yuri reached up to unfasten Otabek’s belt. Otabek shut his mouth, his eyes wide, but when Yuri had to glance down at his hands in order to get the belt fully out of the way Otabek stopped him.

“No. I don’t want that.” The gruffness in his voice had the startling sting of a slap. Yuri let his hands drop, sitting back on his haunches. He felt very young.

“Fine,” he said. But Otabek was still speaking, and Yuri could hear shades of other feelings in his voice now, more uncertain, less direct.

“At least, not right now. Sorry. I just, uh.” 

Yuri looked up when Otabek floundered and saw that Otabek wasn’t looking at him, his gaze averted to the side. He had the momentary masochistic thought that it was because Otabek couldn’t bear to see Yuri like this, on his knees in front of him, like he found Yuri too humiliating to observe. But Otabek hadn’t seemed like much of a prude so far, and Yuri doubted that was it. He seemed embarrassed, but not for Yuri’s sake.

“What is it, then?” 

“I want--I want to be able to see you. Your face.” 

It was hard to continue feeling slighted when given a reason like that. “You like my face that much?” Yuri teased, but he was already standing and taking Otabek’s hand. Otabek looked a little grumpy after his surprisingly soft admission. But he didn’t pull his hand back and Yuri led them to the bedroom, just as he had their first night here.

Yuri flicked the bedroom light on automatically and immediately regretted it, as the harsh overhead somehow made everything seem more dubious, but changing his mind and turning it off would be losing face. He turned around and Otabek was there, eyes on him. 

“So here's my face,” Yuri said, and he didn't mean for it to sound so caustic, like he was pissed about the way things were going. Otabek just smiled, and reached out to cup Yuri’s cheek, and Yuri experienced what had to be a very minor heart attack.

The abrupt sweetness of a hand on his cheek was nothing compared to Otabek’s other hand, which was cupping Yuri's dick and rubbing him through his jeans. Otabek had no doubt felt his erection their first night here, when they'd been making out naked. But this was different, the purposeful touch made Yuri feel hot all over, overwhelmed even though his hips were pushing forward, grinding into Otabek's palm. He tried to turn his face away but the hand on his cheek turned into a grip--slight, but with enough force that Yuri felt a thrill in his pulse.

“I don't mean to push you,” Otabek said, somewhere between a pant and a murmur. The heel of his hand pressed into the length of Yuri’s dick, feeling out the shape of it. “I just want to--to see how you look, when you're getting off.”

“I--nnh--i could put on a show, if that's what you want--”

Yuri was only half paying attention to the words coming out of his mouth, most of his focus was going towards humping Otabek's hand, but Otabek's gaze sharpened. It was clearly what he wanted, to look.

“Okay, fuck. Hold on.” Clumsy was something Yuri almost never felt, but he practically tripped over his feet getting his pants off. “You too,” he said in the midst of stripping his shirt, because Otabek was just standing there fully clothed and if Yuri was going to be watched, he wanted something to look at himself.

Otabek obliged. Yuri sat on the edge of the bed, and then--this was supposed to be a show--scooted back onto his knees in the center. He licked his lips, not quite sure what should happen next. He was used to having to bluff his way through inexperience when in the field. This should be no different. But with Otabek settling onto his stomach, propped up on the pillows with his eyes trained on Yuri, it seemed like all his usual bluffs were firmly out of reach.

“Is this what you like, too?” As he spoke, Otabek reached out to brush a finger against Yuri’s forearm, the touch seeming automatic and almost indifferent. But Yuri was keyed up enough that he flinched, then wanted to curse.

Otabek’s eyes darted up to his face, worried. Yuri found his usual instincts taking over, turning any weakness to his advantage like he always did. He grabbed Otabek’s fingers and pushed his hand away, pointedly.

“No touching,” he said, and let one eyebrow arch as he dropped Otabek’s hand. He straightened his posture, his thighs and torso stretching into one long line above his bent knees. “You want to know what I like?”

Arousal fluttered over Otabek’s features in a hundred little tells: a twitch of his lips, flared nostrils, eyebrows drawing together momentarily before his expression smoothed again. He nodded.

Yuri gave Otabek his most wicked smile. “You don’t get to touch, but you do get to direct.”

“Yes,” was all Otabek said. His hips pressed lightly against the comforter when he spoke; a subtle movement that might be missed unless you were staring at his naked body, which Yuri was. More of his hesitancy left him, easing away in the face of Otabek’s clear desire.

“Touch yourself.”

Otabek was watching Yuri’s dick, not bothering to look at his face anymore, and something about that both turned him on and inspired insolence. Yuri kept his hands hanging limply at his sides. “Touch myself where.”

Otabek snorted, his gaze still fixed. “Touch your cock. Hold it like you’re going to jerk off, but don’t stroke it just yet.”

Dammit. Otabek was matching his mood, apparently. Yuri followed his instructions, wrapping his hand around his half-hard dick and then stilling, waiting for the next command.

Otabek tilted his head. “Stroke until you’re hard.” Yuri did, it didn’t take much, and then Otabek said, “Stop. Squeeze yourself with as much pressure as you can stand.”

It wasn’t so dramatically different from the way Yuri touched himself in the shower, or late at night when he was getting ready to fall asleep. At the same time this felt like it might as well be on another planet from those perfunctory routines. Electricity raced up his spine, every muscle held at attention because it was someone else--not just anyone else: Otabek--calling the shots, critiquing his actions, making decisions about what he’d do next. He was used to others directing his body, choreographing its movements and dictating its motions. It had never made him feel like this, hard and aching, at the edge of his self-control.

He had only suggested this to avoid seeming like a blushing virgin, but now he feared it would be a miracle if he didn’t come embarrassingly fast.

“Play with your balls with your other hand. Tug on them, just like--yes, like that.” Otabek adjusted his position on the bed, one of his thighs lifting slightly. His head was nearly level with Yuri’s straining thighs and he still hadn’t looked away from Yuri’s performance. It was silly to feel flattered by that, considering the sheer obviousness of it, but still, it made Yuri smile. Otabek’s hips still occasionally pressed into the bed, and Yuri wondered if it was a subconscious movement.

“Stroke yourself again, faster this time.”

Yuri bit back a groan. This was good, it was _really_ good, and every muscle in his body responded to the pleasure and the positive attention, his back arching and his hips pushing forward. He wasn’t thinking about it or putting much conscious effort into making this look good. But he felt eager to please, the desire to impress working in tandem with his hand on his dick to push him closer to the edge.

Now Otabek groaned, his hand making a fist next to the pillow, and Yuri wondered how difficult it was getting for him not to touch himself. That wasn’t a rule Yuri had laid out, but it seemed to be one Otabek followed anyway, not allowing his own satisfaction until Yuri had finished his. 

“Don’t stop.” 

Yuri closed his eyes briefly, sinking into the feeling of his hand tightening and releasing with every stroke. His legs began to tremble, sweat pooling at the small of his back. 

“You’re incredible,” Otabek said, his voice breaking on the exhalation. Yuri felt his own breath hitch upon hearing that, hard evidence that Otabek was coming undone while watching Yuri, unraveling because Yuri held his attention. Yuri sucked in breath between his teeth and Otabek was still talking, words tumbling out of his mouth in a gravelly rush, so unlike the way he normally spoke-- “Fuck, I could watch you for hours, Yura--”

Was it the nickname itself, or the sound of it on Otabek’s tongue, each full vowel drawn out and more full of sweetness and longing that han any name had the right to be? Either way, Yuri’s surprise caught him like a snare around his ankle, suspending him off the ground. Control was a distant dream, laughably beyond him. He was coming, his hips jerking as an unguarded noise rushed out of him, all air pushed from his lungs. 

For several long seconds after, he said and did nothing, just stared up at the ceiling with his hand still on his dick and his shoulders heaving as his breath caught up to his heart. Then he came back to his senses and looked down, alarm pricking at him.

The situation merited alarm: he’d managed to come all over any part of Otabek within range. A long stripe of semen painted the line of his neck, and more had landed on his chin, spattered in his hair. Either Otabek’s own reflexes or sheer luck had saved him from getting any in the eye, but that wasn’t much of a silver lining. Yuri was seized with horror at himself. 

“Fuck,” Yuri said. They were both frozen, Otabek’s mouth open and his eyes dark and half-lidded, still trained on Yuri. As soon as the shock wore off, Otabek would probably be out of the bed and out the door, gone for good. So much for hiding his inexperience. “I’m--sorry--”

But Otabek was already moving, not off the bed like Yuri had feared, but flipping himself over onto his back with a soft grunt, immediately reaching down to touch himself. Yuri watched as he jacked himself just a few times, each flex of his wrist and forearm urgent and mesmerizing, before he came with his head thrown back, half his body spasming up off the bed as he shot onto his abs.

Unlike Yuri, he did it silently. His eyes stayed closed as he fell back onto the bed afterward, the longer part of his hair flopping over his face as his head lolled. Yuri stayed kneeling for a few moments, apprehensive, but Otabek seemed to feel no urgency whatsoever about wiping the come off his neck and face. After a while, he opened one eye and gave Yuri a dazed frown, leaning forward just enough to grab at Yuri’s wrist and pull him until they were collapsed together.

Yuri shifted, trying to relax. His legs slid against Otabek’s. They had both broken a sweat. Otabek yawned. Apparently Yuri was the only one here embarrassed, which perhaps meant that he didn’t need to be.

They lay together for long minutes. Yuri wished for the fatigue that typically followed orgasm, but couldn’t manage to feel anything but tense. Otabek’s arms, warm and firm, felt like a vice. He fidgeted, then rolled slightly away, still touching but far enough that he could observe Otabek’s prone body.

One of Yuri’s earliest field missions, just after his sixteenth birthday, had been a lavish party thrown by some city politician with a penchant for extortion and embezzlement and--this is where Yuri’s particular talents came in--storing sensitive information about his illicit activities on his battered Blackberry. The party took place in an enormous nightclub in the city’s revitalized warehouse district. It looked like something out of a bad horror film: blacked out windows and thirty foot ceilings and suspended cages for dead-eyed gogo dancers to undulate inside. So cliche. And the perfect place to pick a pocket.

Yuri’s cover that night had been acrobatics. Suspended from the impossibly high ceiling, he hung cocooned in a hammock of aerial silks. In truth, he preferred rope work to the showy silks, but showy was part of the package that night. He twisted himself into elaborate poses in the air, silky fabric looped around his arched limbs holding him secure. The finale of the routine involved a starfish fall, very dramatic--down and down Yuri tumbled, head over feet, arms and legs spread wide, the safety of fabric unraveling as he fell, only to be abruptly stopped short by a single loop around his waist, inches from the ground. 

He felt an echo of that luxurious rush now as he looked at Otabek’s naked form. It wasn’t a freefall--more of a controlled descent. He knew he’d stop before he hit bottom. The bed in his room at the apartment was only a twin, a child’s bed. It kept them close, their warm legs tangled together. Otabek’s chest rose and fell steadily, as though he was unaware of Yuri’s tumbling heart.

Yuri’s costume for that mission had been a form-fitting, semi-sheer nude catsuit embellished with silvery crystals. It had been a strategic garment, both hiding and accentuating the not-quite-grown quality of his athletic frame. The politician, his mark, had been very taken with it, though Yuri had felt it made him look like a sexless plastic doll. It had been a distinct pleasure, a feeling of vicious triumph, to transform from the coy acrobat blushing at an older man’s advances to a lethal instrument with the snap of his fingers. He loved the neat finality of a silk scarf turned garotte, using just enough pressure to render the fat cat politician unconscious, but not dead. Slipping his Blackberry from a not-well-concealed inner pocket. Satisfaction.

He had ghosted away from the loud bass still pumping into the club from its gaudy wall of speakers and rejoined his extraction team in an unmarked van across town. When he’d settled into his seat, the leader of his tac team actually laughed at him. “Only you, Yuri,” he gestured at Yuri’s body, still costumed as the acrobatic boy, “could slink unnoticed through the night wearing nothing but a handful of cheap rhinestones.”

In fact, Yuri never went unnoticed. He’d learned early on that the quickest way to go undetected was to march about as though you were owed the world and all the treasures in it. He’d stolen jewels just by walking up and taking them, swindled office assistants out of state secrets with a few choice insults. Subtlety had never been an effective tool for him. Some things were just better accomplished through direct action.

And yet now, hesitation. He knew what he wanted from Otabek, but not how to ask for it. Or maybe he was afraid to ask. The bruises on Otabek’s ribs were larger than they had been a few days ago, yellowed at the edges with dark purple centers. It looked like a bouquet of pansies had been scattered across him. He was so beautiful. Yuri wanted to press his open palm to the tenderest parts of him until he screamed. 

As if he could read Yuri’s mind, Otabek’s eyes opened halfway to observe him through his lashes. 

“If you are going to strike me down, I wish you would get on with it.”

Yuri huffed. “Would it work?”

Otabek gave him a considering half-smile. “I’d put up a fight, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Are you sore? How tightly can I hold you?” Yuri wanted to wince with how needy he sounded, but he tried to school his features into something resembling neutrality. Otabek tested his stiff limbs, stretching in a way that reminded Yuri of stray dogs shaking off sleep. He lifted one arm above his head, an invitation for Yuri to lie next to him, which he did. 

“How did you become what you are?” Otabek asked him, after a moment. He probably hadn’t meant for it to sound so vague, but it struck Yuri as a question with too many possible answers.

“What do you mean?”

“Who were your parents?”

Yuri sighed. That had always been the wrong question to ask him. 

“My father was drafted into the army before I was born.” He spoke as if by rote, imagining himself reading facts from a briefing folder. “He never came back. I don’t think anyone expected him to. My mother died in a hospital of sepsis. When I was a few months old she had her gallbladder removed. I guess they couldn’t keep the surgical site clean.” 

He looked over at Otabek, gauging his reaction. Yuri had long ago accepted that for most of the people he met, in his line of work, there was a decent chance that any secrets he might have wanted to keep were already known. There was probably a briefing file on him in every government office in the former Soviet Bloc, and a few other countries besides. Otabek didn’t look as though he was digesting new information. 

“You were raised by your grandfather.” Otabek said it like a prompt, for Yuri to keep speaking. It made something harden in Yuri though--this confirmation that Otabek knew so much about him and he knew so little. Everything about Otabek was mysterious to him. The worst of it was that he liked it that way. He knew very well he could go to Yuuri, or even Viktor, and with an afternoon’s digging know more about his bedfellow than most husbands knew of their wives after thirty years of marriage. 

But he was reluctant. These hollow facts wouldn’t fill the ache in him that he felt when he looked at Otabek. He didn’t want to talk about his grandfather.

“How did you become what you are?” he demanded. His voice sounded hollow and shrill in his ears, but he couldn’t stop his fingers from teasing across Otabek’s ribcage, stroking the outline of each bruise. Tenderly.

“You,” Otabek said, with feeling. He looked down at Yuri, tucked up next to him. “When we met the first time. You were younger, but you seemed like a soldier already. I couldn’t beat you. I wanted to.”

Yuri stilled for a moment, unsure how to digest this, then rejected it. “I don’t believe you,” he scoffed. “Maybe it’s like you say. Maybe you got better after that. But no one is only a reactionary.”

Otabek laughed. “Which is the revolution and which is the counterrevolution? I have asked myself this question many times, just like Gedali.”

“What the hell are you talking about.”

Otabek looked at him, a little sadly. “Pleasure does not like orphans in his house,” he said, as if quoting something from memory. “I guess you never sat through interminable literature classes like the rest of us, Yura.” Otabek punctuated the endearment with a gentle squeeze to Yuri’s hand. He leaned down and put his lips against the shell of Yuri’s ear, whispering. “You are your own Great Master, aren’t you?”

Yuri shivered all over, and a rush of pleasure singed his nerves. The night suddenly seemed full of possibility. He rubbed himself along the length of Otabek’s body, feeling fevered. Their lips found each other in an urgent kiss, but the moment was cut short by a loud buzzing from the floor near the bed. Yuri’s phone, vibrating with an incoming call. 

Yuri groaned as he rolled away. He fished blindly for the phone and mashed the screen viciously when he answered.

“What.”

Viktor’s voice sounded from the earpiece, tinny and severe. “Report in. We have three agents in medical and two MIA. All active agents recalled for briefing.”

The information didn’t quite penetrate. Five agents compromised in some way. It seemed absurd--there weren’t any large ops on at the moment. In fact it had been quite boring lately. These agents must have been pinched on routine stakeouts, or while going to the laundromat, or something equally mundane. 

“When,” he finally managed.

“Now.” Only Viktor could manage to sound impatient and clipped, but also like he was having a laugh at Yuri’s expense all at the same time. Yuri ended the call without any pleasantries.

Otabek watched him with interest as he wordlessly stood from the bed. His clothes were scattered about, mixed with Otabek’s discards. 

“I’m going.” Yuri tossed Otabek’s jeans in the vicinity of the bed and Otabek neatly caught them. He extracted his own cell phone from the pocket and checked it with an impassive face.

“I can give you a ride.”

Yuri stopped dressing, his hands absurdly suspended above his head with his shirt half on. His stomach churned with panic and shame, and he forced the feeling down. 

“No.” He didn’t try and offer an explanation, and Otabek didn’t push for one, to his credit. He seemed to sense Yuri’s need for space, and made no move to dress himself. 

Yuri ran a hand through his messy hair, stomping his feet in his thick boots to settle them. “I’ll see you again,” he told Otabek, trying to infuse the words with inevitability. Otabek nodded.

“Yes. Here.” He looked hopeful. “Tomorrow?”

Yuri nodded and then bolted from the room. He was out in the street before he realized he hadn’t said goodbye.

***

A gorilla disguised in a man suit ambushed Yuri about two blocks south of the apartment. Under normal circumstances, Yuri was pretty good at avoiding getting the shit kicked out of him by part-simian bodybuilders in deserted alleyways, but he’d been too busy mentally berating himself over Viktor’s phone call. 

He should probably have been more alarmed about the contents of the call, but his thoughts kept straying to Otabek and his alarmingly good-looking yet stoic face. Then came the guilt for not caring very much about five field agents out of commission, only to be interrupted by the memory of Otabek’s skillful rescue. It was a vicious little circle of thoughts, only broken when he was suddenly yanked sideways, slammed against a wall, and stabbed just close enough to his right lung to hurt like hell but thankfully not end his life.

He was lucky the gorilla only stabbed once, then stepped back slowly, like a sculptor surveying his work. He was tall as well as wide, a mountain of a man with the face of someone who’d never had the experience of being the smallest person in a room. It was embarrassing that this imbecile had gotten the drop on Yuri. He clutched at his wound, applying pressure, and sent out a vicious kick that earned only a grunt from his opponent. Shit.

The gorilla advanced again, and Yuri kicked again--this time he managed to knock the knife from the man’s hand. He ducked low under an open-pawed swipe and then barreled forward, as though he planned to charge right through his opponent. At the last moment, he feinted right, towards the mouth of the alleyway. His mad dash ended as abruptly as it began. He was wrenched backwards by the hood of his sweatshirt. He let himself go with the momentum of the hand pulling him, felt when his assailant released him as his body started to fall towards the ground. 

Again he sprung away at the last minute, this time dodging in the opposite direction. The other end of the alley was just a collection of dumpsters and the crumbling back of a building, but Yuri had good luck, usually, if he could gain the high ground. He hit the dumpsters at a flying leap and managed to scramble up the side of one. He felt the sickening sensation of blood gushing from the wound under his ribcage but he didn’t feel much pain. Not yet, anyway. Shock and adrenaline were good for that.

The man advanced towards him. He really was absurdly proportioned, like a poorly designed bad guy from a video game. Yuri almost pitied him. He’d probably die young of kidney failure, or a heart attack. There was such a thing as too much exercise.

To scale the building behind him, Yuri would have to turn his back on his assailant, and also let go of his stomach. He had no idea how deep his wound was but it did seem to be gurgling out an unhealthy amount of fluid. He’d definitely been stabbed, not slashed, which seemed to increase the odds that climbing the wall might hasten his imminent demise. On the other hand, being squashed between the pectoral muscles of this steroidal gym bunny would also hasten his demise. He started to climb.

There had been times in his life when Yuri had lamented having the physique of an adult spider monkey--earlier tonight, for example, when he’d been nude in front of the stupidly well-proportioned marble statue that was Otabek without clothing--but he was grateful for it now. His hands were slick with his own blood, but he still found purchase between the craggy bricks of the building. Up and up. He couldn’t feel his arms, could only distantly detect the throbbing ache of his wound. He nearly fell when he reached the gutter and it scraped across his stomach as he hauled the dead weight of his limbs onto the roof top. 

His attacker looked up at him from the belly of the alley. He made no attempt to follow Yuri up, but did reach inside his jacket. Yuri didn’t wait to see what he might withdraw. He forced himself to his feet and took off at a ragged run across the black tar roof. Belatedly, he covered his leaking wound with one hand, pressing in. His clothes were saturated in blood. He felt it squeeze between his fingers.

If he made it through this, he would have a scar. He could even imagine how it would look: a pale pucker, round with a spiked border from the stitches he would inevitably need. A punctuation mark written onto his skin. An asterisk. He knew that there were some in his line of work who were proud of their scars--each an opportunity for a story, tales of near misses and daring escapes--but Yuri had always privately thought his unmarred body was a greater accomplishment. To get away clean, never caught, never used like a human pincushion, that was a the sign of a true spy.

He ran as long as he could, across the dense rooftops of the city. He wasn’t paying attention to where he went, choosing each next step based only on instinct. Eventually he could run no more. He let himself sink down, half hidden between two large fans set close together on the flat roof of what might be a warehouse or an office. He had lost so much blood. He was very tired. He tried to arrange his body so that gravity would slow the bleeding, and even that small movement made dark spots sparkle before his eyes. He shouldn’t close his eyes. He had a phone in his pocket. He couldn’t make his hand move to retrieve it. A bright wave of pain consumed his body, sharp like a blade all over again. 

He closed his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Otabek quotes from Isaac Babel's short story "Gedali," from Red Cavalry.  
> -Yuri calls Yuuri 'sel'skaya baba,' which roughly translates to a hag from the village. Thanks to mrsronweasley for the Russian help.  
> -Thank you to twitter pals, and cerasi especially, for the many helpful suggestions on what Yuri's spy organization should be called. Other acronyms that I did not end up choosing but that really made me laugh: SKATE (Strategic Knowledge and Advanced Tactical Executive), AGAPE (Agency for Global Assistance in Policing and Espionage), and EROS (European Regional Organization of Surveillance).
> 
> I'm [zeegoesthere](http://zeegoesthere.tumblr.com) on tumblr, feel free to come say hi.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More than possible,  
> more than necessary—  
> as though  
> looming with poetic delirium in a dream—  
> my clot of a heart has grown into a mass:  
> that mass is love,  
> that mass is hate.
> 
> _-Vladimir Mayakovsky, "I Love"_

Yuri’s senses came back to him individually, one-by-one, but left without waiting for the next to arrive. He could smell refuse wafting up from dumpsters in the street and the dusty stone smell of rooftop gravel, and the scents almost stirred his mind to consciousness before they drifted away. Then he heard heavy footsteps several stories below, and the clang of feet on an emergency stairwell. He could almost remember to be afraid of someone, something coming after him. Then nothing, again, the silent black cocooning him before taste paid him a visit, nothing but iron on his tongue and bile threatening at the back of his throat, almost repellant enough to make him open his eyes, but not quite.

In the end it was touch that penetrated and stuck around. Yuri felt someone lift his shirt, felt the pain of his wound being touched, pressure against it. His other senses crowded in, a sudden cacophony. He could hear a voice cursing in Japanese, the sound of some package being ripped, could faintly smell another person’s body, sweat and clean clothing. 

The package turned out to be a sterile bandage that Yuuri now pressed against his wound. The flow of curses had stopped, turned into Russian as his partner snapped a request for a med team into his communicator. Yuri opened his eyes, only to find that his vision was mostly gray at the edges, the pain from Yuuri’s hand pressed against his wound denying him focus.

He tried to speak but it came out as a wet cough, blood and spittle on his lips as his chest shook from the effort. Immediately Yuuri’s hand was there, cradling the back of his neck. 

“Stay still. I have you.” 

The words and Yuuri’s capable hands on him should have been comforting, but Yuri was reduced, half-dead. Most of his faculties had bled out across Moscow’s rooftops and what remained was primal instinct of the most confused and beaten sort. Fear and distrust hit him in waves and he felt the need to push away and keep moving even if there was no mental connection as to why. 

It didn’t matter. When he struggled to sit up Yuuri held him in place, and all Yuri could do was gasp and choke. He tried to tell Yuuri to get away from him, but the words slurred. 

“It’s all right, you escaped. Whoever did this isn’t anywhere close, and medical will be here soon. You just have to stay with me until then, okay?”

Later, Yuri would remember the calm clarity in Yuuri’s voice, how there’d been no trace of panic nor grief, nothing of the anxious crier Yuuri had hinted he might become when sufficiently worried about his partner. He might have disgraced himself before, but tonight he’d proven himself at least capable of finding Yuri and dragging him back from death’s door.

Scraping one shitty spy off a rooftop might not be enough to redeem him in the eyes of their command, but it wasn’t something Yuri would forget. 

Between the dancing gray shadows that took up most of his field of vision, Yuri could see the tops of buildings illuminated by yellow streetlight, and above them a few weak stars that tried to hold out amidst the light pollution. He thought he heard an ambulance, and maybe it was coming closer. He felt Yuuri’s fingers (gloved, he was dressed for field work) stroke over his forehead, pushing sweaty hair back. Yuuri’s other hand was still steady and firm, and quite painful, over the stab wound. 

It was the worst sort of consciousness, but Yuri managed to cling to it until the medical team arrived, heaving him onto a stretcher and getting him out of there.

When he woke again at the med bay at headquarters, Yuri stared at the white, pocked surface of the acoustic ceiling tiles and tried to process what he knew, what he should know. He had almost died of blood loss, but none of his important organs were damaged. Yuuri had saved him. He was receiving a transfusion. Viktor was hovering over his bed with a concern masked in cloying cheer, telling him he would be alright. Yuuri stood outside his field of vision, filling the room with his anxious energy. 

Yuri couldn't bring himself to care much about either of them. He thought of Yakov lurking somewhere as well, how he would berate Yuri, maybe even sanction him for his stupidity and dereliction of duty, but he couldn’t care about that. Machines bleeped their flat, ominous bleeps, letting him know his heart and lungs were working as they should, and he couldn’t even care about that.

There must be something in his IV bag other than saline, because he felt nothing. 

***

Under normal circumstances, Yuri would get at least a few days off following a tragic stabbing incident that robbed him of several liters of blood and at least twenty-four hours of consciousness. These were not normal circumstances.

Never in all his time at KATSUDON had Yuri experienced such rapid and unchecked chaos. So many agents had been attacked or ambushed. Phichit had nearly been killed after an unmarked white van ploughed into the side of the limousine he’d been driving while posing as an embassy chauffeur. Minako’s iron clad undercover identity as a sympathetic dance instructor at an elite academy favored by politician’s wives for their spoiled daughters had been abruptly blown when four armed men burst into her studio during a pointe lesson and tried to take her hostage. Guang-Hong, who wasn’t even a full agent yet, had had his legs broken by a crowbar while merely walking home in the evening. No one was safe. They had all been compromised.

The assailants in every case had been bratva. It made no sense. KATSUDON was anti-government, an organization that existed for the sole purpose of forcing a check on corruption and overreach. They did not police the streets. In general, agents ignored organized crime and were in turn left alone, unless there was some explicit link between the black market and a particular political pawn. Skirmishes occasionally broke out, but never like this. This was warfare. This was scorched earth. KATSUDON was being ripped apart limb by limb.

There was no time to slip away to see Otabek. Even if there was time, Yuri could no longer justify his indiscretion. He didn’t think he had compromised himself--he certainly had said nothing to Otabek that could have resulted in such complete and total anarchy. But he had been sleeping with the enemy. Literally. He couldn’t help but feel guilty, as though every agent injured had been felled by his own hand.

If he slipped his phone from his pocket a few times a day just to look at the blank screen, it was only to strengthen his resolve. He was a spy, not a lovesick boy. He had work to do.

Only the work was frustrating in the extreme. He’d come to some kind of mental truce with himself about Yuuri, who had after all saved him from an ignominious death alone next to the aging air handling unit of an anonymous factory roof. But Yuuri acted strangely lately, cagey. He skirted giving any direct information about how he’d managed to locate Yuri, or how he’d done it so quickly. He changed the subject when the topic of mafioso henchmen came up--which was frequently now that the work of avoiding detection, ambush, and discovery was all-consuming. Yuri didn’t know what to make of it. He thought near-death experiences were meant to bring men closer. Yuri felt he trusted Yuuri, finally. But did Yuuri trust him? Did Yuri trust himself?

Also frustrating was Viktor, who had been temporarily restored to field agent status in a desperate attempt to patch holes in their increasingly thinly-spread force. Viktor was a good spy, but extremely annoying. He also seemed bound and determined to glue himself to Yuuri’s side. This was as good as gluing himself to Yuri’s side as well, so that Yuri found himself with two clingy, overly attentive partners instead of just the one.

And the ambushes didn’t stop. Yuri had always counted a successful mission one where he could slip in and slip out without detection of any sort. Now, it was all he could do to clear the mission objective and duck at the right moments to avoid getting clocked. He now wore kevlar under his disguises. It had become standard issue. It made him feel stiff and fake. Underneath the body armor he still wore a bandage, though it shrank day by day, dwindling like the scab it hid. Eventually the stitches would come out and scab would heal. It should have made Yuri feel resilient, but it didn’t. He just wanted it gone.

Viktor and Yuuri were not-quite-arguing, as was their habit. Yuuri’s polite pessimism regarding a risky piece of their upcoming mission was met with Viktor’s usual enigmatic confidence. Yuri drifted away from them into an unmarked alley behind a small market that was currently closed, despite it being Friday afternoon. The topic of their argument was the role Yuri would play in tonight’s mission, how much risk he would be under and whether or not that risk was necessary. Yuri found himself completely uninvested in this discussion, unmotivated to argue either in defense of protecting his own neck or in defense of his own competence and ability to handle any level of danger. Apathy hugged him too close to access any brighter feeling.

The end of the alley emitted a scrabbling sound, and when Yuri wandered closer he could see that it was a feral cat, clawing at trash. She looked up at his approach, her eyes flashing yellow, huge compared to her skeletal frame. They both went still. Yuri waited for her to run, even though he wasn’t coming any closer, but she just watched him.

Her belly was bulging, and Yuri wondered if she would have her kittens here in this alley or somewhere more protected, maybe under a porch. He crouched down and held his hand out, hearing his grandpa’s voice in his head telling him not to handle stray animals, but the threat seemed distant. All his shots were current, his employer made sure of that. 

Behind him, Yuuri’s voice rose sharply on a Japanese expletive, and Viktor hushed him in Russian. They probably weren’t arguing about Yuri anymore. They were probably talking about the blooming rot at the center of all their work, the dread they all felt at the beginning of even a mission as simple as this one, the sense that dark things were coming that could not be outrun. Yuri had the sense to wonder at the specifics of their conversation, to guess that even if he were close enough to overhear that there would be layers of meaning and double-meaning beneath each phrase; he knew that things were being kept from him, could feel the presence of webs being spun deliberately outside of his knowledge or control. But he cared more about the grubby paws stepping cautiously closer to his outstretched fingers.

She stretched out her gray-striped neck to sniff at his hand, probably not knowing what to make of the particular material of his black gloves. She kept herself just out of range to be grabbed or touched. She was smarter than he was, knew not to get too close. Not that it mattered: he was bigger than her, stronger and smarter, and if he wanted to he could corner her in this alley and all her claws and sharp teeth and quick reflexes wouldn’t save her from being taken.

He missed Otabek. Missed him in a way that cut through all his fear and suspicion and growing sense of doom, missed him so intrusively that it spiked its way into his thoughts no matter what task he should have been concentrating on. Right now was less of a spike, more of an ache. He wanted to hold this cat and he wanted to be held by Otabek. He hated being so obvious, hated how he couldn’t see a feral cat as only itself, but instead as some kind of grossly sentimental metaphor.

The cat scampered at the sound of Yuuri’s footsteps behind him. He’d lost the argument, apparently, which meant Yuri would fly solo during the mission, on the front line of any danger. Yuri didn’t mind. 

***

Yuri had a recurring dream. He had been dreaming it since he was fifteen years old.

In the dream, he was dancing Albrecht’s variation from Act II of Giselle. It was his last performance at the Youth Grand Prix and he loathed everything about the routine: his insipid costume, the facile choreography, the predictable music. 

He knew it was a dream and not a memory because in every performance he ever gave he was always utterly alone on the stage: other dancers, spectators nervously pacing in the wings, audiences, judges--all would fade away leaving him on the knife’s edge of solitude.

But in the dream he was surrounded by the white bell skirts of the corps du ballet. He danced, aware of their anxious fidgeting, like moths buzzing around the glass of a streetlight. They closed in, drawing him into their hypnotic dance. He followed them through a darkened forest to a grave. It was the grave of his grandfather.

The tombstone was incomplete and wrong. It gave a death date but no date of birth, displayed his grandfather’s hated first name and not the middle name he’d always been called by his friends, his family. 

Yuri knew it was a dream and not a memory because in his memory he danced this variation with exacting precision, every leap and turn crisp and clean. But in the dream his limbs were heavy and sluggish, they moved painfully through a pantomime of dance but it was like dancing with a lead weight tied around his neck.

He danced and danced, his clumsy movements embarrassing alongside the ethereal Wilis as they twined about him. He was no longer Albrecht but Giselle, in her satin corset and stiff tulle skirt. The costume was tight around his chest, constricting his breathing. He danced, laboring to draw breath, unable to stop the panic welling up inside him.

He knew it was a dream and not a memory because he never got to dance the Albrecht variation at the Youth Grand Prix for his senior debut. He practiced it for months, learned the steps until they sunk deep into his muscle tissue, but he never made it to the competition. When he and his grandfather arrived at the airport for their flight to the qualifier, they were detained at security. Two sharp-looking men in sharper suits came and took his grandfather away. They disappeared behind a door and never returned.

Yuri stayed in the airport for two days and nights hoping to see his grandfather again. He might never have left but he was afraid he’d be arrested if he loitered indefinitely. He didn’t have keys for grandfather’s car. It took three city buses to get home. He cried, sitting on the floor of the living room--not yet the tears of grief, but of confusion. 

Yuri returned to the airport each day and waited for the sharp men. They didn’t come for many days. He followed one of them home and watched him through his windows from the street. He didn’t have a family, no adoring wife or smiling children that might have humanized him for Yuri. He was just a man. A man who drank beer in the evening sometimes and watched boxing matches on television, went to bed at 10:30 at night and woke up the next day to go to the airport and kidnap people’s grandfathers.

Yuri watched for days, but eventually lost his patience. He followed the man to a convenience store, orchestrated bumping him roughly between the aisles, and stole his cell phone. It was most likely sloppily done, but Yuri had had no training then, only purpose.

He had to take the phone to Kirill, the man who sold bootleg movies under the table at a newsstand around the block, to get the phone unlocked, but once he did the power he felt was unreal. So much information spread out before him: an entire world he’d never dreamed existed. Later he would find that even then he was being watched by KATSUDON. They must have been impressed because they recruited him soon after.

He never saw his grandfather again.

There is a jump that features heavily in the Albrecht variation called an assemblé: the working leg sweeps up as the dancer bursts into the air, and the standing leg meets it in mid-air. At the height of the jump, dancers can add beats of their legs: two, or even three. It’s a very basic jump, but in the body of a skilled dancer has alarming power. The dancer appears to jerk abruptly upwards and forward, not as if propelled but as though yanked into the air by an invisible string, the little fluttering beats like a struggle against compelling force.

In the first few months of his training to become a spy, Yuri thought his purpose was to find his grandfather. Later he knew that there was nothing to find: he’d been dead before Yuri even had a chance to swipe that agent’s phone. For a while he thought his purpose could be vengence, but that too drained from him quickly. 

It was ironic that he did not learn what it meant to be a dancer until after it was all over. Control, power, speed, agility, even grace were all just tools, and the dancer’s body was a tool as well. Yuri emptied himself of everything except his anger and became a weapon. And if in the end he was only used to shoot at the knee caps of the government that had destroyed him, knowing the corrupted body would live on, he at least had the satisfaction of knowing he’d caused pain and anguish.

Yuri had made himself into something like a gun. He was ready to be aimed and fired.

***

There were bunks for agents at KATSUDON headquarters that Yuri sometimes used when he couldn’t be bothered to drag his tired ass home after a particularly draining mission, but he didn’t actually live at HQ. He had a little efficiency in a trendy neighborhood, nestled in an artfully crumbling brick building just close enough to the commuter line for the walls to tremble whenever a train passed. It was the kind of apartment rented by University students studying philosophy on a rich relative’s dime, and Yuri supposed that’s what his neighbors assumed he was. It was a good cover: no one expected students to keep regular hours, or be particularly polite. If they judged him for his monk-like solitude, or the occasional, irritatingly loud presence of Viktor, the only person who ever visited him at home, they kept it to themselves.

It was also on the bus line to the public face of KATSUDON headquarters, which was convenient and plebeian in a way that pleased him immensely. He liked his routine. It settled something inside him to sit shoulder to shoulder with people who were probably on their way to jobs stocking grocery store shelves or in offices somewhere. Bank tellers and secretaries and peoples’ nannies. He was just like them, and he was nothing like them.

This morning, he found himself watching a little boy with black hair who was methodically destroying a coloring book while his mother, presumably, carried on an animated conversation with a woman sitting across from her. The boy was so absorbed in his task of ripping each page from the spine, he didn’t notice Yuri watching. He looked to be about seven years old. His fingers were clumsy but strong. His face was neither happy nor angry--it was blank with concentration, as though he was engaged in a complicated surgery. 

Yuri let himself get lost in concentration too. He saw that his stop was approaching, but he let it go by, then another and another until he was far from where he was supposed to be. His thoughts drifted as the city trundled by in the bus’ windows. It had been nearly a month since he’d been stabbed. A month since he’d seen Otabek. 

He rang the bell for a stop at random, got out, and started to walk. He made it look aimless, but he knew it wasn’t. He let himself circle the block three times before he actually took the stairs up to the apartment. 

There was a certain sense you got from rooms that were truly empty--rooms just felt different when they were completely unoccupied, soulless. Yuri couldn’t see into the living room from the door of the apartment, but he instinctively knew as soon as the key turned in the lock that someone was there, waiting for him. After the last few weeks of constant ambush that should have made him tense and wary, but instead he felt a reassuring rush of anger. It was the most intense emotion he’d experienced since waking up in the med bay.

Of course it was fucking Otabek. He sat poised on the ratty couch with its sunken, threadbare cushions looking nervous and guilty. The guilty look did nothing to curb Yuri’s rising anger.

“What the hell do you think you are doing?” 

Yuri crossed the room as he spoke, stopping just short of Otabek, leaning down to get right in his face. Otabek leaned forward but didn’t stand. Despite his guilty look he locked eyes with Yuri easily. There was something so earnest about him and it made Yuri feel like he’d swallowed glass.

“I was worried about you. I thought you might come here.”

“Why? Because of you? You know nothing about me.” In another universe, Yuri would be capable of the kind of cold fury you saw in movies. In this one, his voice edged shakily higher, loud in his ears. He punctuated his words with a juvenile shove to Otabek’s shoulder that Otabek didn’t even try to deflect.

“I just wanted to see you.” The words were such a perfect echo of what he’d said to Yuri the last time they were here. He thought about being on his knees and didn’t try to keep the revulsion off his face. 

“I think you’ve seen enough of me.”

“Yura, please--when I heard I had to--” Yuri couldn’t help flinching.

“Don’t you dare.” His hand crept up and covered the spot where he’d been stabbed. “You’re the reason it hurts when I draw breath.”

Otabek frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Spare me! What could have possibly made you think this was a good idea? If I wanted you here I would have texted, but I don’t, I don’t want to see you here or anywhere else. We’re done.” He was yelling. Nothing was in control. Perhaps it should matter more to him that he actually had no idea if Otabek was in league with the bratva or not, but he was past that, all he knew was that he had to stop making himself vulnerable.

“You should leave.”

Otabek stayed silent and made no move to leave. He was still just sitting on the end of the couch cushion, as though he might rise and take Yuri into his arms at any second. Yuri wanted him to do it so badly it wrenched a sob out of him. His rage, his conviction, deflated.

“Everyone is compromised,” Yuri choked out. “Seung-Gil. Phichit. Fucking Chris. Minami. Those assholes. They took him. He’s so young. Younger than me. Younger than I was when I--” He inhaled around another sob and then breathed out wetly. 

Anger warred with anguish and Otabek still didn’t speak. “Say something,” Yuri finally snapped.

But Otabek refused to speak as he’d refused to leave. He held out his hand, palm up, towards Yuri and Yuri let himself be pulled in close, between Otabek’s knees. One of his tears dripped off his face and fell onto Otabek’s cheek and startled a laugh out of Yuri. He was so stupid. He leaned down and kissed Otabek softly on the mouth. When he pulled back, he saw his own emotions mirrored back to him in Otabek’s eyes.

“This apartment is everything to me,” Yuri said, giving up. “Everything I have left. It was grandfather’s. It was my family. Until they took him. They’ve taken everything.”

Otabek’s fingers tightened around Yuri’s and he pulled their hands to his chest. 

“Not everything.”

It was horrible and cheesy but it made Yuri smile. Otabek drew him down into his lap and they wrapped their arms around one another.

"I don't want you to leave," Yuri said. “I don't hate you, I--it's something else.”

Otabek’s arms tightened. 

“I love you too, Yura.”

***

Maybe Yuri just had a personality suited to escalation. After their maudlin scene at the apartment, he found himself texting Otabek a lot. In the mornings, lying in the rumpled blankets of his bed, he sent sweet texts about waking up together, describing minutely all the ways he wanted Otabek. In stolen moments throughout the day, he sent biting commentary on the world, laced with puns and heavy with innuendo. In the evenings he turned out the lights and touched himself and cataloged every moment of pleasure in extreme detail. 

Sometimes it took hours for Otabek to respond and sometimes seconds. Yuri was horrified and delighted to discover that Otabek liberally used emoticons. KATSUDON was still operating more or less on lock down and Yuri found himself with too many free hours, stuck at headquarters trying to ignore the increasingly obvious affair going on between his partner and their superior. He went to bed every night and the only thing he remembered from his day was Otabek: his economical smiles and severe eyes, the way he twisted his hands in his lap when he had something important to say, how small his ears were in comparison to his face. 

They met again, and again. They fucked in the tiny twin bed in Yuri’s grandfather’s apartment and laughed about it. They ate shitty cheburek from a street vendor in the rain one night and got soaked. They compared notes about the useless yet useful information they’d memorized as spies: Otabek could describe the flag of any country in the world; Yuri could recite the preamble for every constitution of each developed nation. They showered together, held each other, kissed and groped and got each other off. 

Yuri had never tried to date before, though he knew some of his colleagues maintained robust enough cover lives to take lovers. It wasn’t that he’d minded the idea of lying about himself to a potential lover--he’d just never been interested. Yuri was single-minded. Before, he had devoted himself entirely to the work. But now, with a suddenness that startled him, his attention was narrowly focused on a new target. He knew it wouldn’t last, these honeyed days of flirting and fucking. But he couldn’t stop himself anymore.

***

_The weather is very nice today._

No context. Yuri was about as baffled by this message of Otabek’s as the average civilian would be by the previous text on his phone--a series of coordinates and a coded message to take out half the board of directors of a certain corporation if his next mission were compromised. Otabek never texted Yuri first, and never provided mundane commentary on anything about his day. Yuri stared at his phone. The only thing he could think of to say in response was, _And?_

_Meet me outside?_

Yuri cursed himself for the warmth in his cheeks. He pressed his lips together hard to keep from smiling and snuck a glance up at Yuuri, walking next to him and also looking at his phone. If Yuuri had noticed his partner blushing stupidly at a text, he wasn’t showing it. 

_Where did you have in mind?_

The park is in a ritzy neighborhood, close to the university. Close enough to Yuri’s apartment that he really should be uncomfortable with this whole setup, but he’d tripped and stumbled off the train of sensible reactions the night of his embarrassing meltdown (the night Otabek told him he loved him, christ), and so far he’d proven incapable of boarding it again. 

So here he was, waiting for Otabek in the middle of a sunny public park, while the only other people around were those privileged enough to have leisure time in the middle of a workday. Mostly students. Some of them were checking Yuri out. He locked eyes with one dark-haired girl and glared, and she giggled behind her hand like she wasn’t at least several years older than him.

“Classmate of yours?”

Yuri turned, feeling a slight chill of exposure, as if Otabek had said ‘neighbor’ instead of ‘classmate,’ as if he already knew they were in Yuri’s backyard. But he was smiling, teasing, and Yuri had no choice but to smile back. He bore the smile for the shortest time possible before turning it into a scowl. 

“Why’d you invite me here? What are we doing.” 

“We’re doing what everyone else is doing.” Otabek’s smile widened, showed charming white teeth for a few moments before he looked cool again. He set off on one of the little pebbled paths through the park, inclining his head for Yuri to follow. Yuri followed, and didn’t even resent it. 

They walked together through the autumn leaves, almost all fallen from the trees now, and this was probably the last day of any warmth the city would get for a long time. Yuri felt stupidly grateful that he got to spend it with Otabek. He was supposed to be taking this time to either sleep or thoroughly research tonight’s mark, but instead he could be anyone right now, anyone who carefully wasn’t holding hands with the boy beside him.

The further they walked into the interior of the park, away from the gardens and the fountains where most of the other visitors dawdled, Yuri felt suffused with energy. It was inexplicable--he’d crashed into bed at three, only to be roused at 7:30 for a briefing, weapons inspection and frustratingly vague meeting with Yuuri and Viktor to plan tonight’s work--but he practically skipped ahead of Otabek, twisting around to grin at him while walking backward. 

“This is what you texted me for? A walk in the park?”

Otabek shrugged at him. “It’s nice out.”

“Yeah.” Yuri tilted his face up, the sun so warm between the stiff breeze that came reliably every few seconds, necessitating jackets. “This is a date.”

“Yeah.”

Yuri had to bite his lip to keep wildness from surging out his mouth. 

“But we’re not college students, are we?” Otabek looked bemused when Yuri glanced over at him, and he was slow to react when Yuri jabbed forward, hitting him--not bruising, but not lightly--in the shoulder. 

“Not exactly, no.” Otabek unzipped his jacket, turning away as he stripped it off and tossed it on the grass. Yuri shouldn’t read so much into the ease with which Otabek had picked up on his idea, shouldn’t feel this liquid pleasure at his unspoken requests still being heard. There was nothing magical about it: they were both fighters, it was pleasant weather, there was no one around, so it felt inevitable. Still.

“You should show me something new,” Yuri said after they’d circled each other for a while, exchanging a few feints and dodging each other’s blows. “I’ve seen all this before, I’m gonna fall asleep.”

“What makes you think I have moves you haven’t seen before?” Otabek wasn’t breathing hard yet, but he was right on the edge of exertion, with color in his cheeks and his faded black t-shirt stretching taut over his chest. He was clearly enjoying himself. Yuri scoffed at him.

“You seemed a lot more impressive when you were bailing me out. But maybe I’m misremembering, it could have been a concussion.”

Yuri saw another flash of Otabek’s teeth before he twisted and made some move too fast for Yuri to track, and then Yuri hit the ground with his legs swept neatly out from under him.

“What the hell was that?” Yuri wheezed with what little air remained in his lungs.

“Trying to impress you.” Otabek offered him a hand, which Yuri took and yanked down, planting a foot on Otabek's chest to try and flip him backwards. Otabek went with the momentum and they tumbled, rolling over each other and getting grass stains everywhere. Yuri could hear his own gasps of laughter and Otabek's short, excited intakes of breath. Later he would feel ludicrous, embarrassed and angry at his schoolgirl flirting and how he’d fucking _giggled_ at getting and keeping Otabek’s attention. But right now he was pinned beneath Otabek’s expert hold, too breathless to be anything but delighted.

Otabek’s kiss pressed him down into the grass. Yuri pressed his thigh up against Otabek’s legs in return. As exhilarating as this was, making out in a public park was a truly terrible idea; the idea that had just occurred to him as a replacement option was possibly worse, but Yuri recklessly opened his mouth.

“I live close to here,” he murmured in Otabek’s ear. Otabek stopped mouthing at Yuri’s neck and sat up gracefully.

“Lead the way.” 

If Otabek felt any tension at Yuri choosing to invite him over to his home address for the first time, he didn’t show it. He brushed Yuri’s fingertips with his own while they made the short walk from the park to Yuri’s place, the sun’s warmth sinking into all Yuri’s scared and angry crevices as they almost held hands. He didn’t really hear the nice things Otabek said about his apartment once they were inside. He was grabbing Otabek’s collar, walking him backward, kissing him by the windows. Kissing him in the bedroom doorway. Kissing him on top of pillows that Yuri hadn’t had the chance to sleep on for four days.

Otabek undressed him very deliberately. He carefully undid each button of Yuri’s jacket, batting away Yuri’s hands when he tried to help. Yuri shivered as Otabek slid the jacket off his shoulders, then slipped his hands up Yuri’s t-shirt to remove that too. He planted a series of kisses down the center of Yuri’s slim chest before efficiently dispatching his belt and sliding his pants down his hips and off his legs.

Yuri was already hard enough that his cock was straining obviously at the front of his briefs, a dark wet spot already spreading. It felt natural now, his eagerness. He sprawled back on the bed and canted his hips, feeling exceptionally lazy and ready for Otabek to do whatever he pleased with him.

It was usually night when they met. In the daylight streaming in from the window the dust motes floating between them glittered brightly. Yuri watched Otabek efficiently remove his own clothes, stayed still until Otabek was naked and on top of him, and then all he felt moved to do was drape his arms around Otabek’s shoulders, crossing his wrists behind Otabek’s neck. Otabek was less carefree, kissing Yuri and grinding into him with purpose and drive. Yuri let his legs fall open.

He directed Otabek to root around in his nightstand drawer for lube and then Otabek went down on him while he worked Yuri open. Yuri had to admire his multi-tasking skills, working Yuri’s dick against the back of his throat while the rhythm of his fingers never faltered. It seemed crazy to Yuri that a couple of months ago he hadn’t known how good it felt to have his dick sucked with two fingers in his ass--how could he have gone his whole life without this sensation? He wanted to feel this every day. He wanted Otabek every day.

When Yuri felt himself getting close to the edge, his hands twisting harder in Otabek's hair and his thighs trembling, Otabek pulled off. He looked up at Yuri with his hair in his face and Yuri’s dick resting wetly against his cheek, and raised an eyebrow when Yuri panted and groaned.

“Come on! I’m close, I--fuck--”

“Do you not want me to fuck you?” Otabek eased his fingers out of Yuri’s hole slowly and Yuri thumped the back of his head against the pillow, biting a snarl into his bottom lip.

“Obviously I do, asshole.”

“Then I don’t want you to come yet.” Otabek gave Yuri’s dick a light squeeze before climbing back up the bed, holding Yuri’s thighs apart to position himself. 

Yuri turned his face to the side and pressed his burning cheek against his shoulder. He was pinned by his arousal. It only seemed to grow along with the frustration of being subjected to Otabek’s decisions and denied his own; somehow the combination turned him on even more, made it all the better when Otabek entered him. It was gentle at first, slow before Yuri felt a sharp thrust that made all his nerve endings jump. He gripped the sheets, arched his back and breathed through the pain, the deep penetration forcing him out of his head and into the moment, stripping his thoughts and feelings bare.

Otabek's hands were on him throughout, hot fingertips pressing into his hip and a gentle hand cupping the back of his knee. When Otabek was all the way in, his balls brushing Yuri’s ass, Yuri opened his eyes and looked at him. Otabek breathed deeply, his eyes half-lidded, beads of sweat glinting on his forehead. Yuri swallowed. For a strange moment he had a vision of Otabek as a bloodthirsty brute, looking to conquer and pillage, ready to subdue Yuri for no more complicated reason than animal instinct. It wasn't _not_ a sexy image. But of course that wasn't really Otabek, and the moment slipped away when he turned his head and pressed a kiss to Yuri’s knee, never breaking eye contact.

“I’m all right,” Yuri said, because he knew Otabek was asking. 

Otabek made a soft, low humming noise and started moving his hips. Yuri very quickly ascended again to the brink of orgasm. Otabek fucked him hard enough to hollow out every snarled thought or tension until Yuri felt boneless, empty save for the pleasure rolling through him in waves. He distantly registered making noise, unconscious yells rushing out his throat with every thrust, breath sucked through his teeth or filling his smiling, open mouth in turns.

Otabek licked his palm and jerked him off. It didn’t take much. Yuri shot all over his stomach with a hoarse grunt, his shuddering spine arched high off the bed. Otabek touched him immediately, his thumb swiping a trail through the semen collected in Yuri’s pubic hair, smearing the mess up Yuri’s abdomen until his spread handspan was nearly covering Yuri’s chest. Yuri felt Otabek’s weight sink him back down onto the mattress, settling him.

“Gross,” Yuri mumbled, out of breath, when Otabek took his hand back and sucked Yuri’s come off his thumb. Otabek shrugged. 

“Here. Turn over.” Otabek pulled out and Yuri flipped over onto his stomach, pillowing his head on his folded arms. His whole body felt recklessly loose now, a particular serenity that he only felt when he was the one who got to come first. He sighed when Otabek got back to fucking him, raising up on his knees and feeling like his hips might as well be liquid. 

Otabek used enough force that Yuri had to brace himself to keep from getting slammed into the headboard. He dreamily imagined what it would be like if he let himself get slammed, collecting a painful bruise on his forehead with each of Otabek’s thrusts. Probably Otabek would just stop if he saw Yuri getting bonked into things, but maybe Yuri could explore his new curiosity towards pain during sex in other ways; maybe Otabek would be willing to choke him or slap him.

That would have to be for next time if it happened at all, because now Otabek was coming, bent over Yuri’s back and clinging to his shoulders with his sweat-slick forehead touching the nape of Yuri’s neck. Otabek’s gasps came out so much higher than his speaking voice. Yuri reached back to touch him wherever he could reach, clumsily stroking his palm down Otabek’s ribcage.

After a few moments Otabek caught Yuri’s wandering hand, intertwining their fingers. Everything was still. Yuri realized that their breathing had synced, and wondered about their heartbeats as well.

They went their separate ways soon after. The afternoon was waning and various preparations had to be made before Yuri rendezvoused with his partner at six. He didn’t know what Otabek was going off to do, and he didn’t ask. They’d left Otabek’s motorbike chained up close to the park, and Yuri made the walk with him to get it. It was unnecessary, and Yuri didn’t really have anything he needed to say while they walked, no conversation thread that desperately needed following. He just wanted to prolong their minutes together, and thankfully Otabek did not make him admit this.

The evening crowd was milling about the streets now, so there was no question of touching or kissing each other goodbye. Otabek met Yuri’s eyes after strapping on his helmet and straddling his bike, and Yuri stared back, gave him a sharp nod. The corners of Otabek’s mouth lifted as he put on his sunglasses. Yuri stood where he was to watch him go, breathing in exhaust.

_This is going to end_ , he told himself. Tried to. He stood in the street for several minutes repeating it to himself over and over again. It didn’t sound real.

 

***

The last place Yuri wanted to see Otabek was in the middle of another fucking fire fight. There had been so many of them recently, too many. Yuri knew now that the first few years of his life as a spy had been a big fat fucking lie. He was starting to get used to people smashing guns into his face. 

Thanks to the new protocols Viktor had put into place, Yuri wasn’t alone. He had Yuuri with him, and even though they were pinned down behind a truly hideous maroon Pontiac in the most dismal corner of a derelict parking deck, they both had guns. Yuuri was just signalling the beginning of a two-man shoot-out escape route when the sound of bullets abruptly became the sound of bodies hitting the ground.

Yuri had spent a lot of time watching Otabek in the apartment: Otabek folding his clothes with military precision, Otabek washing dishes in the laughably inadequate kitchen sink, Otabek’s silhouette behind a shower curtain as he roughly soaped his body, Otabek on top of him, underneath him, sleeping, waking. Yuri had never seen this version of Otabek before. From his vantage behind the Pontiac, he watched Otabek’s relentless advance. He watched him dispatch one, then two more shooters with a few purposeful strikes. This was not the Beka who had, just last week, kissed the tender skin of Yuri’s wrist, smiled and brushed Yuri’s hair from his eyes while he fucked him. This was something else.

In a way it was hard to watch. There was no anger or passion in Otabek’s fighting, only detachment. Yuri had always hated that in other spies, because he himself could do nothing without deep emotional investment. Even undercover, he never played at the aliases he adopted--he unearthed each personality from deep inside himself, yanked them to the surface and gave them life. It was a draining process. When the mission was over, he never quite went back to being Yuri again. It was the same way in a fight: you didn’t win by fighting, you won by becoming the version of yourself that was unbeatable. 

Otabek fought without personality, unless it was the personality of a bricklayer, setting stone on top of stone until the wall was built. Otabek was not a fighter at all: he was the fight. It quickly became apparent that he was not going to be stopped.

Next to Yuri, Yuuri tugged his sleeve. He jerked his head toward the stairwell to their right. 

“We need to go,” Yuuri whispered. Yuri started to rise, and then hesitated. He couldn’t help but feel he’d somehow given himself away, how he knew Otabek intimately. He still didn’t know what Otabek’s agenda was, but he certainly wasn’t in this game for shits and giggles. It seemed strange that Yuuri would want to just leave without asking any questions. Sure, they hadn’t gotten lucky very much lately, but all the more reason to interrogate an apparent newcomer. Or was he waiting for Yuri to call his bluff? Did he already know about Yuri’s illicit activities?

If ever there was a moment to insert some plausible deniability into his cover, it was now. “Don’t be an idiot,” Yuri scoffed, “we should find out who that guy is.” He gestured to the scene across the lot, where Otabek had just broken someone’s knee with a sharp kick and was currently pummeling someone else with the sort of disinterestedness that one might use while scrubbing soap scum off a bathroom tub. 

Yuuri looked at him strangely.

“We know who that guy is. He’s Kazakh Intelligence. He’s been working with Viktor on some top secret project for weeks. Haven’t you seen him at HQ?”

Yuuri’s words sent a flood of shame through his whole body. Yuri had never seen Otabek at headquarters. He had no idea that Viktor even had a top secret project going. He felt a sting of betrayal, as though all this had been deliberately kept from him. He rifled through his memory trying to find a single moment when Otabek had implied that they were on the same side and came up blank. He could think of plenty of moments when he’d alluded to their likely opposition to one another and couldn’t recall if Otabek had ever said anything to confirm or deny. Had he really been so distracted by his own dalliance that he’d been this obtuse? 

And Otabek--what a fucking shithead. Why had he never mentioned working with Viktor? He must have known exactly who Yuri was the whole fucking time. Otabek’s mysterious, stoic act was no excuse for never mentioning they were on the same goddamn side. 

“We should go,” Yuuri repeated, gesturing again towards the stairs. This time, Yuri followed. 

Adrenaline kicked his heart around in his chest and made his thoughts tangle together as he ran. He’d never bothered to try to find out anything about Otabek. He’d wanted to stay ignorant and what had it gotten him? He’d thought of their affair as rebellion, something purely his in a world where he owned nothing, not even his own identity. But it had been meaningless. What were they to each other? Just coworkers?

They ran for twenty minutes before they slowed, ducking around an alley to catch their breath behind a dumpster.

“We can catch the elevated line from here,” Yuuri said, gesturing behind him to the intersection they’d just passed. Yuri just nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

The walk to the train station was silent and anti-climactic and the train ride itself even more so. Halfway to their stop Yuri felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket and opened it to a message from Otabek.

_Are you ok?_

Yuri stared at the words for a moment before he could make his fingers type a response.

_Tomorrow 7pm at the apartment_

He turned his phone completely off and returned it to his pocket. He closed his eyes. He couldn’t examine what he was feeling, it was too big, too mad, too unwieldy. He shoved it down and let himself go blank. Whatever this was, he would find out. Tomorrow.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I can’t carry it—  
> and I carry it, my burden.  
> I want to throw it down—  
> and know  
> I never will.  
> The arches of my ribs won’t bear the pressure.  
> The rib cage creaks with strain.
> 
> _-Vladimir Mayakovsky, "I Love"_

Now that his undercover assignment was over, Otabek’s apartment could look however he wanted it to look. He wasn't obligated to play the thug anymore, and he could make this new place something that was truly his, a space where he could feel at home and known. But a few months of being welcomed back into KATSUDON’s rank and file wasn't enough to kill his old habits. He’d spent so long ensuring that reflections of his real self--dog-eared books, CDs from childhood, very few photos--could be contained in shoeboxes, easily hidden in spaces beneath floorboards. Now that Otabek had a real life to settle into, he didn't know quite what to do with his new expanse of freedom.

Today the bare walls of his Moscow apartment seemed especially stark. Maybe it was the contrast with Yuri’s minimal but messy studio.. Yuri’s apartment felt like him, reflected him. There had been a ballet program propped on his dresser and a bowl of bright oranges on his table. Otabek couldn't see any color in his own home at all. Even though it had been days since their day in the park, that little glimpse into Yuri’s life lingered with him.

Even when the substance of his thoughts was inconsequential, Otabek seemed to orbit around Yuri. It was a lot. Otabek stepped over the threshold to his apartment and for a moment felt overwhelmed. He was always distracted and scattered after seeing Yuri. It was like blinking at a dark shabby basement room after staring at the midday sun. 

It should disturb him, probably, but it didn't. 

Otabek was not normally an anxious person, but his insides churned after watching Yuri and Yuuri leave the skirmish together. Not because he didn’t think they could handle themselves. They probably would have been fine even without Otabek’s assistance. But Otabek hadn’t seen Yuri in the field since that first night at the warehouse, and it was somehow startling--seeing him cornered, then seeing him leave with Yuuri. He was Yuuri’s partner rather than Otabek’s, and they left swiftly together without so much as a glance his way. That was protocol, of course: it would have been foolish for Yuri to stay behind to help Otabek out when there was no need, foolish for him to wave goodbye or in any other way take the time to acknowledge their relationship in the middle of a job. It was not a good sign that Otabek found himself half-wishing for these things, hoping for their relationship to skip over the bounds of professionalism more than it already had.

And he worried for Yuri’s safety. That had become a routine feeling for him ever since Yuri almost bled out on a rooftop, but i was heightened seeing him follow Katsuki’s lead. Texting Yuri afterward might not have been welcome, but Otabek hadn’t checked the impulse. Yuri’s clipped demand that they meet, followed by no other texts for the rest of the night and whole day afterward, did not help his unease.

Now he felt awkward showing up at the apartment, even though he'd been here often enough to almost think of it as theirs. He felt no ownership whatsoever; after he'd successfully broken in Yuri had given him a key to the building (though not the apartment itself) but in this moment he was a stranger.

Yuri didn't open the door with a scowl, which was in itself unusual. There was a cold austerity to his features, an indication that some judgment had already been made. Otabek couldn't ignore the strangeness in the air, and as soon as Yuri shut the door behind him he said, “What's wrong? You're acting weird.”

It had not been the right thing to say. Yuri's mouth twisted. “I’m acting weird? You work for KATSUDON.”

“Yes.” 

“What the hell? You just never mentioned that? Did you think it was funny? Laughing at me this whole fucking time?”

Otabek didn’t know how to react to such an explosion. He suspected his face had gone blank, the worst time for him to appear cold or unaffected, but Yuri was hard to follow. 

“I don’t understand.” He didn’t know what else to say. 

“Don’t give me that!” Yuri circled Otabek with flashing, hostile eyes. Otabek had an urge to spread out his hands to show he was unarmed, or open his shirt to show he wore no wire. “This whole time, you’ve been keeping secrets, telling me lies. I don’t know anything about you!”

“Yuri, I told you that first night that I knew you, you said--you said you knew me too. I just assumed--”

“You assumed wrong!” Yuri’s face reddened, sending adrenaline spiking through Otabek’s bloodstream. At least he had stopped circling. Now he stood in front of Otabek with his hands balled into fists, his features warped by apoplexy. 

“I was recruited by KATSUDON when I was nineteen, four years ago. We met during one of your trainings. After that I was undercover with Kazakh intelligence for a long time, that assignment only ended four months ago.” 

“Shut up,” Yuri spat. 

“Do you believe me?” Otabek took a cautious step forward, his hands open and spread, and Yuri bit his lip viciously and continued to glare, but he didn’t say no. “Do you trust me?”

“Yes!”

Even though he didn’t understand it, Yuri’s anger was catching, making Otabek feel panicked. His voice felt stuck in his throat. He swallowed, exhaled, pressed his tongue to the back of his teeth. Still the urgent pace of his own heartbeat made this difficult. “Why are you so angry?”

“Shut up!” Yuri roared again. “Of course I trust you. Of course I trusted you. But you made me think things… that they were different from how they are.”

Yuri said things like from time to time. Hinting that Otabek was hiding things, when Otabek could not remember a time he’d been more open to another person. Yuri was the one who ran hot and cold, climbing into his lap one minute and the next telling him to fuck off. Acting like Otabek had forced him to feel such strong emotion when it was Yuri who had always made Otabek feel too much, too fast. Always.

Yuri had caught him from the moment they first met. He’d seemed so thin and reedy bundled up in his costume of teenaged rebellion, but underneath he’d been hard, compactly muscled. He looked delicate but he was indestructible, the way spider’s silk was supposed to be stronger than steel cables. He was a study in contradictions, capable of performing feats of unimaginable patience and control one moment and the next exploding over some imagined slight. Everything came easily to him, yet he made nothing easy for himself.

Now he stood in front of Otabek, the picture of fury, accusing him of lying when it was Yuri himself who had lied. He’d said he remembered Otabek and he hadn’t. It stung more than Otabek even believed possible. Otabek said the only true thing he could think to say.

“Yuri, I love you.” 

The words did nothing to diffuse Yuri’s rage--they only made him burn hotter. He stepped forward, forcing Otabek back against the wall. Otabek was taller, but Yuri seemed to loom over him. He pressed his left forearm against Otabek’s throat, under his chin, with enough pressure to restrict his breathing but not enough to choke. Otabek let him. Yuri gave him a searching look, almost confused. The look stayed as his right hand found the front of Otabek’s pants and slipped inside.Otabek wasn’t hard, but the shock of Yuri’s skin against his own was so intense it made tears prickle in his eyes. He let Yuri touch him for a few moments before he stilled his hand with his own.

“I love you,” Otabek said again. This time it seemed to have the desired effect. Yuri’s arm relaxed from his throat and then fell away entirely. Otabek leaned forward and kissed him, tenderly, and Yuri met him with shocking ardor. Every part of his body was affected, every nerve ending sparked with energy. Yuri’s right hand was still buried inside his pants, trapping his arm at an awkward angle between their bodies as Otabek pushed against him. He wrapped his arms around Yuri’s slim frame and pulled him closer. He had tried to say these things with words but he should have known that action was their shared language.

He let himself sink to the floor, still clutching at Yuri, pulling him down too until they were both kneeling on the carpet. Yuri got his hand free and began to use it to remove Otabek’s clothing, his jacket and then his shirt, the button of his jeans and then the zipper. Yuri’s black shirt and leggings were so tight Otabek had to practically peel them off of him. Otabek felt strangely shy, as though it was their first time, or maybe even his first time naked in front of another man. But they had done all this before. Otabek kissed Yuri’s bare shoulder and whispered a prayer into his skin that they would do it again.

Normally, Yuri was a symphony of noises, many of which he seemed unaware he made. He talked incessantly, groaned theatrically, squawked and sputtered and panted, alternated between making imperious demands and sounds of exquisite pleasure when he could cajole Otabek into ordering him around. 

But now they were both quiet. Otabek touched him and he whimpered sweetly and seemed bewildered by his own reactions.

The stab wound on Yuri’s stomach was healed now, but the scar was fresh and pink, puckered at the edges. Otabek trailed his fingers over it and then up to Yuri’s chest, skating over his nipples. He was afraid of this reminder that Yuri was not invincible, despite his titanium will. Yuri Plisetsky could be hurt, could be taken out by some freak attack, could die and there was nothing Otabek could do about it. It was this thought that had kept him from the hospital room--he knew that if he’d seen Yuri laid out like that, hooked up to machines under those awful fluorescent lights, it would have robbed him of something essential, some important piece of himself that he needed to keep going. 

It was the only thing Otabek had tried to hide from Yuri: not the depth of his feelings, but how his love made him a coward, in the end. 

Fucking on scratchy polyester carpeting was a bad idea, but Otabek was afraid that if he tried to move them to the bedroom it would break whatever spell had come over Yuri. He rolled onto his back and positioned Yuri on top of him so that, at the very least, he could take most of the rug burn. Yuri had closed his eyes and was arching his back, stroking himself and squirming in a way that was not unpleasant given their positions. 

Otabek had watched him like this so many times. He felt, guiltily, that it was his favorite thing, watching Yuri. He was so exquisite, so finely wrought, and it was immensely gratifying just to watch him like this, the flush spreading down his chest and his strong thighs clenching around Otabek’s hips, lost in his own pleasure. When he came, he sighed “Beka” under his breath; that was the thing that felt, later in the evening, cruel. To have heard him say his name like that and then not trust him after all.

Now, Yuri collapsed against him. Otabek’s arms came up automatically to encircle him. Yuri sometimes fussed about lying together, sweaty and sticky, after sex, but Otabek enjoyed it immensely. He stroked his hand up and down the center of Yuri’s back and tried to just savor the feeling of their bodies together.

“I’m sorry I didn’t remember you,” Yuri mumbled into his shoulder. “I try not to remember how things were then. I was very unhappy.”

“Are you happier now?”

“Yes. I have been.” Otabek couldn’t help but smile.

“It’s hard to tell sometimes.”

Yuri pulled back to glare at him, then caught himself and looked shy instead. “I haven’t always been sure. You know. What this was.”

“I’m not hiding how I feel.”

“I know.”

“I’m not hiding anything, Yura.” 

“I know!” Now Yuri really did glare at him. “Just promise you’ll tell me everything. Even if you think I already know it. Tell me so I don’t have to guess.”

Otabek pulled Yuri back against him, considering.

“I came back for a reason. I’m on an assignment.”

“The project you’re working on with Viktor?” Otabek nodded. “Yuuri told me.”

That made Otabek pause. 

“He did?”

“When we saw you at the garage. He made it seem like it was common knowledge.”

“It’s not so secret. Not anymore, anyway. It’s related to the escalation from the bratva.”

Yuri pulled away from him and sat up, cross-legged and curling in on himself. It made him look young and vulnerable, but the look on his face was hard--the same soldier’s look that had drawn Otabek to him when they were younger.

“There’s a mole.”

“Yes,” Otabek said simply. His mission had initially been pretty secret, but it was beyond obvious now that the bratva were getting information from inside. Either they had an informant or Otabek needed to revise his credulity with regard to psychics.

“How do you know the mole isn’t me?” Yuri was teasing, but Otabek responded seriously.

“I didn’t, at first. You were on my suspect list. It’s not why we… why I approached you. But you were one of the reasons I had to come back. To come here. In more ways than one.”

“Why was I cleared?”

“We’re pretty sure the mole is someone else. That person is close to you. An associate. But you, forgive me love, don’t work well with others. It was obvious you weren’t in league with him.”

At Otabek’s words, Yuri’s spine grew straighter and straighter, until he sat rigid. His voice was ice cold. “You’re talking about Katsuki Yuuri. My partner.” 

Otabek didn’t know how to answer. It was true. Katsuki Yuuri was almost certainly an informant. His fumble on the Japanese mission, his strategic reassignment to the main office, even his maneuvering to get Yuri Plisetsky as his partner were all too convenient for pure chance. The only thing Otabek could not figure out was who was operating as the bank. The bratva had no problem with KATSUDON--there must be a third party, someone who was pulling the strings, paying off the mafia and possibly Katsuki Yuuri too.

The silence stretched ominously. Otabek sat up, mirroring Yuri’s posture. He tried to reach out, but Yuri flinched away.

“Just say it.” 

“Katsuki Yuuri hasn’t been cleared.” It was equivocal, not an accusation but also made clear what Otabek thought. It was the best he could do on an active assignment. But for some reason it sent Yuri back into anger and betrayal.

“Yuuri’s a shithead but he’s loyal. He saved me. I would have died.”

“And how did he know to find you? How did he get there so fast? Why was he even on that side of town?” 

Yuri stood abruptly and began to gather their discarded clothing. He tugged on his pants and then threw a lump of clothing at Otabek’s head.

“Where were you, Otabek? While I was bleeding out, huh?” 

It was like being burned by a hot iron, those words. There was nothing that Otabek could say. He didn’t understand Yuuri’s motives in saving Yuri’s life, he only knew that his story was weak, illogical. He didn’t need to understand to know that Yuuri had lied. And he knew that even if Yuuri had saved him, his leaks of information were the reason Yuri had been attacked in the first place. He might have staunched the wound, but he had also plunged in the knife. For that, Otabek could never forgive him.

“You need to leave,” Yuri was saying to him. He didn’t want to go, but he did begin to dress, slowly. Sometimes it was good to give Yuri time to just yell. 

“Now, Otabek. Get the fuck out!” Apparently not this time, though. Otabek pulled his shirt over his head as Yuri shoved him roughly towards the door.

“Yuri, please. You said you trusted me.”

“Well I was a worthless shit five minutes ago. Now I know better.” They were by the door. Otabek didn’t want to leave, not like this. He thought he should be angry with Yuri, that his own sense of betrayal would be justified in the face of these extreme swings of Yuri’s favor. But he couldn’t dredge up a shred of righteousness, only a desperation to make things right. He felt sick with it, but Yuri just looked hard, harder than anyone had a right to be.

“It’s the job, Yuri. You know what that means. Better than anyone.”

“Don’t fucking talk to me again,” Yuri said. And then all Otabek could see was the other side of the door.

 

***

It was momentarily very satisfying to slam the door on Otabek’s retreating figure and stalk back into the living room, triumphal and alone. Then it was just awkward and a bit boring. Yuri sat on the graying carpet in the middle of the floor and didn’t quite know what to do with himself. He couldn’t just leave--he might run into Otabek in the street, which would defeat the purpose of ordering him out in the first place. The minutes seemed to tick by absurdly slowly. 

His phone buzzed with a message from Viktor, then another from Yuuri, and Yuri turned his phone off irritably and then threw it across the room for good measure. It hit a pillow and slid down to lodge itself behind a couch cushion. Disappointing it hadn’t struck something hard and shattered, but probably better in the long run. 

It was impossible not to look back on the last few months of his life and feel like he’d become the most embarrassing version of himself. His behavior hadn’t been reckless, it had been bratty and immature. And now he’d made it worse by attacking Otabek with his accusations. He should just get “Yuri Plisetsky is a dumbfuck” tattooed to his forehead and call it a day.

He’d never realized it before, but KATSUDON had been his safety and security ever since his grandfather died. He had felt untouchable as part of this powerful network. It had been easy to put his life in danger, thinking there would always be Yakov and Viktor to castigate and cajole him, the other agents to criticize and compare himself to, the reassuring rhythm of mission objectives and briefings and assignments. It had all been slipping from him the moment he got stabbed.

No. It had started even earlier than that. When Viktor had called to tell him agents were being compromised. When he’d gone out alone and nearly been killed in an ambush. When Otabek had first saved him. It had been slipping from him before he even knew to look for the signs, before Yuuri had become his partner. Something black and poisonous had been growing at the heart of KATSUDON for some unimaginable length of time. Only now had the poison spread to all the extremities, to Yuri--who was, after all, little more than an appendage.

He could not make himself suspect his partner. The pieces wouldn’t fit. And although he regretted ordering Otabek to leave he couldn’t help but resent him for suggesting Yuuri capable of such total betrayal. 

When it felt like an eternity had passed, Yuri made himself get up and retrieve his phone from where he’d flung it. He turned it back on and dutifully replied to the messages and then left. The streets were empty even though it was not quite nine o’clock. He was glad for the dark sky and the solitude.

He went back to headquarters because the idea of sitting alone in his little studio seemed horrifying. He needed to do something to burn out all his energy so his mind would turn off. The training gym was thankfully pretty empty when he arrived. Mila was determinedly climbing the rock wall and Georgi was doing a seemingly endless set of pull ups, but that was it. The only sound in the room was Georgi’s rhythmic grunting as he hauled his chin past the bar again and again. It made Yuri suddenly flash to what it might be liked to get fucked by him and he sent up a silent prayer to Georgi’s ex-girlfriend, the wannabe hairstylist, that she’d find greener pastures.

Yuri also wanted to climb. He chose the rope rather than the wall, since it was distant from where the others were working. Much of KATSUDON headquarters was built out of an abandoned underground train depot, and the gym took advantage of its cavernous enormity with a dizzying climbing apparatus. There was a lot of rope to climb.

The easiest way to climb a rope was to make a foothold by looping the length and then use your lower body strength to hoist yourself up. Yuri chose the more difficult feat: he let his legs fall straight, dead weight, and pulled himself using his arms alone. It was torturously slow, but it took a lot of concentration, leaving no room for much else. He felt the strain of his muscles and it felt right, a punishment that could still count as progress.

He was so lost in action that when he descended he was surprised to see Georgi waiting for him. He let go of the rope and tilted his head but said nothing. His arms ached and he wondered if he’d even be able to move them tomorrow or if they’d be too sore.

“Where were you earlier?” Georgi’s tone was weirdly aggressive--but then everything about Georgi was a little weird and aggressive. Yuri didn’t even try to stop himself from making a face. Who the fuck was Georgi to care what he did with his free time?

“I hope I haven’t got another mother hen. Between Viktor and Yuuri I’m already being pecked to death.”

Georgi stepped closer. If Yuri didn’t know better, he’d think Georgi was trying to physically intimidate him.

“Where were you?” 

Yuri’s annoyance switched to alarm. He had to remind himself that Georgi was a socially stunted homunculus who took everything way too seriously. He was sort of the opposite of Yuri in that he was fucking awful at undercover because he only had one facial expression, like a robot who had been mistakenly programmed with only one personality setting. He was a good fighter, though--surprisingly graceful and agile, despite his looks--and Yuri had known him from almost the first moment he joined KATSUDON. They’d worked pretty well together in the past because they knew how to leave each other alone. They had, anyway.

“I was home in bed, jerking off to thoughts of your ex,” Yuri spat. Georgi’s intensity intensified, and he made to grab Yuri’s shoulder but Yuri shook him off and pushed past him. Georgi didn’t try to stop him. 

***

Otabek’s casual accusations against Katsuki Yuuri echoed in Yuri’s mind through the next week. He went through the motions of spy work, but also kept to himself as much as possible. Guilt boiled inside him whenever his partner spoke. He found he couldn’t meet his eyes, or laugh at him like he used to. Viktor, ever the over-protective meddler, even noticed, cornered him in the hall one day and gave him some well-meaning but off the mark speech about distractions and trust that was weirdly cryptic and entirely unhelpful. He couldn’t sleep at night, even after tiring his body, and his mind sparked with uneasy images. 

Otabek was like a song on the radio that wouldn’t stop playing, now that he’d heard it once. After months of miraculously never seeing him at headquarters, now he appeared everywhere--disappearing around corners, exiting Viktor’s office with that stupid grim expression on his face, emerging from the locker room showers in only a towel. They didn’t speak, even on the day Yuri happened to be exiting the building just as Otabek arrived and they had to awkwardly shuffle past each other in a silent dance of who’s-holding-the-door-for-whom.

Yuri was used to thinking of his life as a dance. He knew what serious business dancing was, how it changed you, got into your muscles and worked them into new and difficult shapes. He could feel himself changing again and it hurt, an aching stretch in his very bones. Growing pains.

He told himself it was worth it, if he could just rid himself of Otabek. Of how Otabek made him feel. The situation at KATSUDON had him wound up and thrumming with nerves, and Yuri couldn’t fight on two fronts at once; couldn’t admit to having acted unfairly to someone who loved him and then face the awkwardness, the remorse, the unknown factor of whether or not Otabek might forgive him. 

The guilt and the pain made him stupid--that was the only explanation for why, after a particularly exhausting reconnaissance mission with Yuuri, he found himself confessing. They were driving home in one of the KATSUDON stock cars, this one a thirty year old silver Volvo, the kind you find on every street corner. It wasn’t a flashy car, but of the nondescript clunkers kept for stakeouts it was one of the more comfortable models. It had heated seats, for instance. Outside the window, winter’s first harsh chill battered at the windows, but the interior was warm and cozy. Yuri was slumped in the passenger seat, staring out into the darkness of a winding country road two hours outside the city.

“I’ve been in love,” he said to Yuuri. The words just seemed to appear in the air between them, not as though he’d spoken them but as though they’d just arrived, broadcast over the radio. Breaking news: Yuri Plisetsky is another asshole in love. Yuuri glanced over at him, bemused.

“In general or?”

“I meant recently, you shithead. I fell in love. With someone.” Yuri faced forward, not daring to look over at his partner. He didn’t know if he’d find surprise or ridicule or what on Yuuri’s face, and he couldn’t bear to find out.

“Is it someone I know?” 

“Otabek.” 

“That was fast,” Yuuri said mildly. Yuri nodded and then remembered that for all his partner knew, Yuri had met Otabek for the first time a little over a week ago in a parking garage during a botched mission. In reality it had been about four months--still a fast courtship, but slightly less fairytale in its proportions.

“I lied, the other day. I knew who he was,” Yuri paused, “I thought I did.”

Yuuri was a good listener. Yuri had never appreciated it before except as a skill that could be put to good use weaseling information out of people who needed a soft touch to confess their secrets. Now, it was a relief like sinking into bed after a long day at work. His speech was halting and gruff, but he let himself speak. He told Yuuri everything--how they’d met, his overwhelming desires, the enormity of what he thought he done and how insignificant he felt now that everything was over. 

“It sounds like quite a romance.” Yuuri had that mothering tone again, the one Yuri couldn’t stand.

“It was something. But it’s nothing now.”

“It’s always the apocalypse with you. You told me to retire when they first made us partners and now look at us,” Yuuri gestured between them in the car, his hand waving across the console dividing the driver’s side from the passenger’s. “We’re at the top of our game. It’s the same with Otabek. You’ll see.”

Yuri frowned. “Otabek is more than a game to me.”

Yuuri furrowed his brow. “You know what I mean, Yurio. Don’t be contrarian.”

Yuri just shrugged. It seemed simple, a misunderstanding, when he spoke about it out loud, but he also knew that his uncertainty had cause. Would Yuuri still think things so easy for him if he knew of Otabek’s suspicions?

Yuri rested his head against the cool class of the window and closed his eyes. He knew, logically, that Otabek was only doing his job, but the idea of Katsuki Yuuri being suspected of anything rankled in him. Yuuri was such a hopeless idiot. Sure, he was talented, but he wasn’t malicious. He was so loyal it was basically a fault, so saccharine it gave Yuri a toothache just to think about it. As though Yuri didn’t notice him taking aside the newest recruits and giving them pointers. As though Yuri didn’t see the looks of adulation he shot to Viktor whenever he thought no one was looking. It was inconceivable that he could be some sort of saboteur. Even more inconceivable that Otabek would be thick enough to suspect him.

Tomorrow, Yuri would swallow his pride and he would talk to Otabek about his mistake. Probably by now Otabek was ready to apologize. Otabek had probably realized how absurd his accusation was as soon as he’d said it out loud to Yuri. He was likely just embarrassed to have thought it at all. But Yuri would speak to him, and everything would be alright. Otabek would kiss him and tell him he loved him and everything would be alright.

He might have drifted off, because when he opened his eyes the clock on the car radio read 3:00 a.m. Yuri frowned and peered out into the dark beyond the window. Trees and blackness. They should at least be approaching the city by now, if not in the heart of it.

He looked over at Yuuri, who was still calmly driving as though nothing was wrong. Probably nothing was.

“Are we getting close?”

“Yes--it won’t be long now.”

Yuri watched the headlights on the road ahead, waiting for them to reveal something other than a narrow patch of country road, but each mile seemed identical to the last. 

“Yuuri. Where are we?”

“We’re not far. I have been driving slow because the check engine light came on.” Yuuri gave him an apologetic smile. Yuri’s frown deepened. He could see the dashboard clearly from his seat and the odometer indicated they were clipping along at a decent speed. The check engine light was not on.

“Maybe we should pull over. Take a look,” he suggested.

“Of course. I should have done it before, but you drifted off. I didn’t want to wake you.”

Yuuri slowed the car and pulled off onto a shoulder. He left the lights on, but parked and killed the engine. Yuri felt a restless anxiety. Truthfully, he didn’t like leaving the city. It made him feel exposed to be out in the open, without the reassuring crush of crowds and buildings and noise.

They threw open their doors at the same time, but Yuri exited the car first. He walked around to the hood and tapped on it twice. Yuuri obliged by releasing the latch, and Yuri yanked it open and fiddled with the prop until the hood was secured. The engine looked like an engine. Yuri didn’t know what he had expected--maybe some obvious sign of smoke or something. A giant hole. But it was just a car engine. It was probably too hot to touch. 

Yuuri walked up behind him. He was still smiling apologetically, and he had a cloth in his hand.

“Is it leaking oil?” he asked, thinking maybe the rag was to check the oil gauge.

“No, this is for you,” Yuuri said.

“What’s going on?” Yuri’s voice was soft, small. He shrank back against the car but did nothing else. He didn’t even bring up his hands to defend himself. Yuuri stepped forward. He was very calm. He held the cloth against Yuri’s face and Yuri smelled chemicals. He didn’t fight.

“It’s time, Yurio. It’ll all make sense later. Just sleep.”

He didn’t fight. He didn’t try to hold his breath. It was too late. He felt his limbs growing lighter, his eyelids heavier. Yuuri was still talking to him in that calm, soothing voice but it was farther and farther away. He followed his partner’s directions. He let himself fall into sleep.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I cannot do it alone—  
> I can’t carry the grand piano  
> (much less—  
> the treasure chest).  
> And if not the chest,  
> if not the piano,  
> how can I  
> carry my retrieved heart.
> 
> _-Vladimir Mayakovsky, "I Love"_

Yuri woke with a start. Something was clanging and this room was dark--the sound was coming from elsewhere, beyond the door. His hands and feet were bound with zip ties and his faculties were sharp but there was a thick dull pain pressing behind his eyes, which must be the feeling of the drug wearing off.

The clanging happened again, and Yuri realized that it didn’t mean human activity, it was just the ancient pipes in this house. When he listened harder, he heard nothing to indicate that he wasn’t entirely alone here, tied up on the floor next to an ancient HVAC unit. 

He tried to catalogue his surroundings further to stave off panic and the sting of being betrayed, but there wasn’t much to be observed. The HVAC unit was the only piece of furniture here. The room was dark and windowless, the only light a weak strip shining beneath a door that illuminated a rickety flight of stairs. He was underground. The floor was hard. Poured concrete. Cold. A basement. He registered that his back ached and craned his neck to see that he’d been propped up against a copper pipe, which was now digging into his back uncomfortably. 

Yuri pushed himself up to his knees and faced the door, which didn’t really put him in a more physically empowering position, but made him feel marginally better than lying curled up on his side like a dejected sack of potatoes. Strangely, the panic he’d expected had yet to hit him; he felt curiously calm, counting his breaths, his concentration naturally drawn to each physical sensation in his body like he was back in ballet class, or scaling a wall. He knew that he’d been dead wrong about Yuuri and that this mistake would likely kill him, but for the first time in his life, rage seemed too remote to really sink into. 

Perhaps it was a survival mechanism, detachment as the best way to keep his wits about him and not latch onto terror. Or perhaps he was not fully awake yet. 

Either way, his zen solitude didn’t last. Yuri heard what sounded like a large door open and then shut, then steps--two people, one of whom was clumsier than the other, at times possibly being dragged--coming towards his room. His door opened. There wasn’t much more light in the hallway, but still Yuri caught a dim silhouette of his partner before Yuuri shoved the second person, stumbling, into the room then shut the door again. The lock clicked.

The second person fell to his knees, his hands and feet tied just like Yuri’s. It was Otabek.

Of course it was Otabek. Yuri’s calm flooded out of him. 

The trouble with having a stupid trendy haircut was that when your hands were zip tied behind your back, as Otabek’s were at this moment, you had no way of getting hair out of your face. Otabek was breathing heavily, his face downturned and obscured by the fall of his hair. Yuri wanted to run his hands through it, fix him up, and he also wanted to shove him violently away. Get out of this basement and this life and just keep running and never look back.

Otabek turned his face towards Yuri. It was too dark to make out the look in his eyes, but Yuri could see that he’d been gagged before being dumped down the stairs. Well. At least there was a reason for his silence at this moment. 

Yuri wanted to yell at him for whatever stupid, probably stupidly brave thing he’d done to get himself kidnapped like Yuri, but for once in his life he found himself speechless. They sat in awkward silence for what felt like minutes while Yuri tried to imagine a single word he could say. It was too much. He’d felt so many shades of betrayal in his life, but this one--Katsuki Yuuri drugging and abducting him, tying him up, throwing him into a basement to rot beside his recently estranged lover--it was still so incomprehensible. 

Eventually the silence was too much, but since he found he couldn’t speak he pushed himself to action instead. If they were going to escape, they would need to work together. He scooted towards Otabek, then rolled his eyes when Otabek involuntarily flinched away. With his arms behind him, it was hard to crawl, so he had to inch worm across the dusty floor until he was as close as he could get. Gently, he brought his mouth to Otabek’s neck, where the knot holding his handkerchief gag was tied, and began to worry it with his teeth, tugging it loose.

It was painfully intimate. In the silent dark, his breath against the skin of Otabek’s neck filled the space between them. His lips brushed against him and he felt Otabek shudder. The knot came loose and Yuri pulled at the handkerchief until it fell away. They were still so close together. He wanted to interrogate him, or maybe start hatching a plan to get untied, but instead he just stayed where he was, nuzzling at the join of Otabek’s neck and shoulder.

Yuri felt the movement when Otabek licked his lips, and couldn’t help but brace himself when he heard Otabek draw in a breath to speak. “Yuri. You’re alive.”

It was not what Yuri had expected to hear; he didn’t know what he’d expected. He should lift his head and shift back a respectable distance--he’d forfeited any right to press close like this to Otabek’s warmth when he’d thrown him out. But he was selfish, and he couldn’t allow even just a few more centimeters of space between them. “Yeah, for now. Are you hurt?”

“I’ll be fine.” That was obviously not a ‘no,’ and Yuri frowned, but before he could insist upon the truth Otabek hurried past the subject. “Do you know where we are?”

God, Yuri had turned out to be a terrible spy. “No. We were outside the city when Yuuri drugged me, but I have no idea where he might have taken me after. I woke up in this room.”

“He drugged you? Are _you_ hurt?”

“It’s worn off. I have no other injuries.” Yuri finally leaned up and back. The hard plastic of the zip ties bit into his skin as his wrists strained against them. It was deeply strange to be so close to Otabek, and not able to reach out. 

Yuri was nauseous with the anticipation of hearing Otabek point out how right he’d been, and how unjust Yuri had been to scream at him and break them up. But apparently he was more professional than Yuri. “We need to get out of here. I have a razor sewn into my belt, if you can get to it.”

“Really? Yuuri didn’t think to check for that?” Yuri himself had been smoothly stripped of all his emergency tools, including the ones he’d tried to keep secret from his partner.

“Perhaps he’s stressed. He is down a partner.”

Yuri’s laugh was louder than the joke warranted, and he bit his lip, hoping that the sound hadn’t carried.

“All right. Where’s the razor?”

“In my belt. There’s a compartment five centimeters to the right of the buckle.”

“Your right or mine?”

“Mine.”

Yuri nodded. His hands were still tied behind him, so he rotated until his back was to Otabek and he could grasp at the belt with his fingers. He had to do everything by feel. He poked at Otabek’s stomach and side a few times before he found his waist, skimming along the smooth, thick leather of his belt until he found the buckle. The sound of his harsh breathing and the buckle coming undone seemed extraordinarily loud and he felt his cheeks heat as he thought about the last time he’d done this with Otabek. It had been under much more pleasant circumstances.

The angle was awkward enough, and Yuri’s embarrassment made him fumble even more. He felt his fingers slide against the seam of Otabek’s crotch multiple times before he could pry free the razor. Miraculously, he managed not to slice open his hand on the sharp blade.

Otabek said nothing, but once the blade was free he turned so that they were back-to-back. Yuri felt Otabek’s fingers interlace with his own, pulling him closer. Close enough that Yuri could begin to saw at the zip tie around Otabek’s wrist. Otabek’s hand held his steady, and he was grateful for it. He felt shaky all over.

He was paying closer attention to Otabek's breathing than he had to. Listening for signs of discomfort, distaste for Yuri being so close to him. Yuri hated himself more than a little for thinking of such things while trying to gnaw this razor through stubborn plastic without fumbling and slicing open Otabek's wrist, but each time Otabek had told him he loved him was playing behind his eyes. The world's most narcissistic highlight reel.

When he'd finally finished, his fingers sweaty and almost cramping where he held the blade, he heard Otabek twist around, his front now to Yuri's back. He cut Yuri’s ties efficiently and then leaned back, leaving enough cold air between them that Yuri shivered.

“I'll get your ankles,” Otabek said. Yuri drew his hands close to his body, rubbing at his wrists, dimly surprised at the sensations--he hadn't realized he'd lost any feeling while bound.

When they were both standing and unencumbered, Yuri felt hesitant to spring into action. That highlight reel was still playing, only now it had moved on to such images as Otabek shirtless and mysterious on his couch that very first night, Otabek on his motorcycle, Otabek walking with him on a sunny day in the park. 

He looked at Otabek, and Otabek looked back.

“You must really hate me.”

Yuri wanted to bite his own head off at the blurted words. He ground his teeth together and turned away, but Otabek responded.

“Why do you say that?”

Yuri moved over to the wall by the door, running his fingers over the doorjamb and testing the lock, mostly for something to do with his hands. He wasn’t sure how to translate the thorns in his chest into words.

“I was wrong about you. And about Katsuki. I was wrong about everything, and I didn’t trust you, and now here we are.” The weight of Yuri’s failure pressed on his shoulders, on his lungs, pressed up from the ground against the soles of his feet. He couldn’t imagine moving again, not like a dancer, not like anything.

“I don’t hate you.” Yuri heard Otabek step closer, and then he stilled, hesitating. “May I….?”

Yuri wasn’t sure what Otabek was asking for, but he jerked his chin. Otabek’s hand settled on his shoulder. It was a respectful gesture, the kind of physical reassurance you might offer to any colleague struggling with self-doubt. But Yuri almost startled from the strangeness of it--he wasn’t sure if they’d ever touched each other with such platonic intent.

“You trusted your partner. That’s not a bad thing, it makes you a good agent. I have also made mistakes. I don’t hate you.” There was a pause, and when Otabek spoke again his voice was lower, almost inaudible. “I could never hate you.”

That was nice to hear, but Yuri had just enough self-awareness to know his happiness was selfish. “Maybe you should. All I’ve done is fuck up your life.”

The hand on Yuri’s shoulder tightened, and then he was being turned around, both shoulders gripped as Otabek met his eyes, frustrated and intent. “Yura, you are a very confusing person. You have yelled at me and broken up with me and I will admit, I hope that that pattern doesn’t continue. But you haven’t fucked up my life. Do you still want me, or not?”

Yuri wrapped his arms around Otabek’s neck and kissed him. It was easier this way, without fumbling around with words. He pressed his whole self into Otabek and hoped it was clear enough; he felt Otabek’s hands on the small of his back, Otabek’s mouth opening to deepen the kiss, and knew that it was. He was enough for Otabek, with all his faults, all his anger. This seemed impossible, but Yuri would try to trust it. They were alone in enemy territory, and there was not much else to trust.

They didn’t part until a noise came from upstairs, a quickly-muffled thump that could have been anything, but Yuri immediately thought of a body hitting the floor. He felt Otabek tense in his arms, and his own shift from kissing to fight-or-flight was just as immediate. Otabek glanced past him at the doorknob, and Yuri moved out of the way wordlessly, allowing Otabek to step in and use his strength to break the flimsy lock. 

There was a seamless rhythm between them that Yuri couldn’t explain but wouldn’t question. He was just glad that all the ups and downs in their relationship had yet to ruin this.

He stepped out into the hallway first, with Otabek close behind. It was empty and completely dark. They found the stairs and started creeping up to the second floor.Yuri was no great lover of guns, but he felt exceedingly naked right now, well aware that if someone armed were to meet them on these stairs they’d be dead within seconds. 

Yuri let out a slow breath as they reached the next floor without encountering anyone. Otabek behind him was a silent, solid presence as they moved through a hallway mottled with scraps of faded Soviet-era wallpaper still clinging to the plaster walls and a few indistinct stains on the ruddy carpet. The circumstances would probably make it all seem ominous no matter what, but the shadows cast by the dim light offered from one bare lightbulb in the ceiling didn’t help.

All the doors he could see in a glance from left to right were open, the rooms inside dark and empty. Yuri thought of the noise they'd heard downstairs: it had seemed to come from the eastern side of this house, but there were only two rooms to the east before the hallway ended, both doors ajar.

Yuri felt Otabek’s elbow brush his, and glanced back to see him incline his head to the east, looking at one of the seemingly-deserted rooms with narrowed eyes. Yuri agreed. They moved silently to either side of the doorway, and at Yuri's nod Otabek went through first, with Yuri right behind him.

The room was empty save for a few empty, shoddy bookshelves against the walls. A naked wire hung from the ceiling, lacking a lightbulb. Two windows with broken glass panes let in the slight moonlight. A person lay slumped in the far corner.

Yuri froze when he saw it, his body falling automatically into a defensive fighting crouch. Long seconds passed. When they crept closer to investigate, they confirmed he was dead. Blood matted his hair and obscured his face, and he was dressed like all the other bratva they'd encountered. He’d probably been killed by a blow to the head with some blunt object. 

His stomach twisting uncomfortably, Yuri left Otabek to search the dead man for any further information while he set himself to the task of examining the wall. A soft knock against it indicated there was another space behind this one. He felt along the wall for any kind of crease or concealed latch.

The noise they'd heard had possibly been the killing blow. Yuri wasn't sure what conclusions to take from this, if any. It could mean that there were divisive factions within the ranks of their kidnappers; it probably didn't mean that there was another agent on their side here, covertly attempting rescue.

Yuri wondered if Yuuri had killed this man. He imagined discovering his former partner’s body discarded in the dark, instead. After the betrayal this shouldn't have been an upsetting thought, but Yuri’s fingers curled against the wall, his knuckles scraping against plaster.

Otabek stood, shaking his head at Yuri’s questioning look. Nothing useful on the body, neither identification nor weaponry. Yuri set his jaw and moved quicker, until finally he felt a seam, something more than just a chip in the plaster.

He looked at Otabek, who looked back at him stoically. If they opened this door, their entrance would not be subtle. Yuuri could be on the other side of it, or some other unknown enemy with an assault rifle trained on the doorway.

But Yuri was sick of sensing his demise forever around the corner. He was ready to face it in front of him, to either best it or die. Their confrontation with Yuuri was meant to happen here, in this house. Yuri didn't see the point in tiptoe-ing around his fate. 

He could read the same conviction in Otabek’s face. Yuri admired the shape of Otabek’s lashes as he lowered his eyes. Otabek took Yuri’s hand and raised it to his mouth, pressing a kiss to his knuckles.

Yuri barely had the chance to squeeze Otabek’s fingers in response before his hand was dropped and Otabek turned away from him, facing the wall with all emotion gone from his face. Every inch the trained secret agent, a soldier.

Yuri called upon his own training and pressed against the hidden seam beneath his fingertips. The wall slid open, and amidst the disorienting flood of fluorescent light Yuri could see his former partner, his back to them. He was embracing Viktor. 

Were it not for Otabek’s presence at his side, Yuri would have attacked, calling the attention of everyone within range and doubtlessly ensuring his own demise. But apparently Yuri's self-preservation instincts worked better when he had more than just his own self to preserve, because he made no rash movements despite the shock and fury pounding in his blood. Yuuri being a mole was one thing, but to be betrayed by Viktor as well was a devastation he might drown in.

At the sound of the door opening, Yuuri twisted to face them, his eyes wide and anguished. His hair was sweaty and mussed and he bled from a shallow cut on his forehead. 

Unlike Yuuri, Viktor’s composure changed not in the slightest when he caught sight of Yuri and Otabek. He just nodded, almost to himself. “Yurachka. Perhaps it's better this way.”

Yuri wanted to scream. He took a menacing step forward, but stopped when he felt Otabek’s hand on his arm. It was no vicelike grip, nothing to impede his movements, just a concerned touch. Yuri gritted his teeth.

“No it's not! It’s much worse for him now, for all of you” Yuuri rounded on Viktor, glaring at him as furiously as he'd embraced him lovingly moments before. “I told you--I've been telling you, regardless of whether or not I'm compromised, this only works if I meet him without backup!”

“We're beyond that now,” Viktor said. “You can’t just--”

“Shut up!” Yuri yelled. “You're both traitors! You've been using the bratva to destroy us! So what the hell are you talking about, being compromised?”

Viktor and Yuuri shared a look, the same kind of silent communication Yuri had seen between them a thousand times in the field. Only now it was the intimacy of two people who'd been working this whole time to bring Yuri's life crashing down around him, and he felt murderous. 

At the same time, it hadn't escaped his attention that neither Yuuri nor Viktor were pointing guns at them, despite them both certainly being armed. No one was making a move to subdue their escaped prisoners. Very little about this made any sense.

“Please explain.” Otabek spoke for the first time, and the unspoken ‘before I start busting heads’ was impossible to miss.

“My assignment is to draw the mole out of hiding,” Yuuri said. “And I'm almost finished, he's on his way here now.”

“Your assignment was to _earn his trust_ ,” Viktor said, frowning at Yuuri. “But he's coming here after threatening you, and he won’t be alone. It's no longer safe--”

“It was never safe.” Yuuri’s voice was closer to a snarl than Yuri had ever heard from him. “And if we back off now, the odds are he'll take even more drastic measures to destroy us. This is our one chance!”

“You kidnapped Yuri to serve as bait,” Otabek said. The hairs on the back of Yuri’s neck stood on end.

“I had to. He told me about you two and I knew you must have told him about me.” Yuri stiffened. He hadn't said anything about Otabek’s suspicions to Yuuri, had been as vague as he could about the reason for their breakup. “I couldn't wait for things to get messy as more people involved themselves. When that happens in undercover ops, people tend to die.”

“And you thought you'd hurry his death along?” Otabek took a step forward, and although his voice remained calm, Yuri wouldn't want to be the person he was stepping towards.

But there was no trace of the apologetic Yuuri that Yuri was used to. He didn't shrink back from Otabek, just frowned with impatience. “I made a difficult choice. The real mole has been demanding more skin in the game--”

“All of you shut the fuck up,” Yuri said. Heads swiveled his way, but he was focused on his body, on what his senses were trying to tell him. He couldn't hear anything quite yet, could barely feel anything--but there it was again, a sense just to the left of hearing and touch that told him danger was close. 

“Someone's coming, or they're here already. Does this room have other exits, we can’t go out the windows.” Yuri turned to his partner automatically, for the moment forgetting that this was the man who'd drugged him and left him tied up in the basement. 

“The wall-grate can be loosened, the tunnel will take you to a window closer to the drain pipe. The rest of you go, I'll meet them in the hall.” Now they could all hear the telltale car engines outside, coming to a quiet stop. Yuri was furious that he'd somehow missed the noise before now, but there was no time for fury, at himself or Yuuri or any of them.

“Absolutely not,” Viktor said. “Your cover's all but blown, they're coming here to take you out.”

“I can handle it. All we need now is his identity, the rest doesn't matter.”

“You're telling me it's fine for you to get shot as long as I see the face of the man who does it?” Viktor looked stricken, reaching a hand out to cup Yuuri’s cheek. Yuri averted his eyes, moving to the doorway on instinct, listening to try and discern the number that were coming.

“We don't have time for this,” Otabek said. He was already removing the grate in the wall, and as urgent as things were, part of Yuri still noticed the bulge of his biceps as he lifted it away. “Who is coming to try and get out this way, and who is staying?”

“I'm staying with pork cutlet bowl.” 

Yuri didn't know why he was saying this. Mere hours ago his partner had betrayed the trust Yuri had naively placed in him, had made him the worst kind of fool. Yuri wasn’t even entirely sure if he believed that Yuuri was one of the good guys after all; maybe he and Viktor were both traitors, that could still be true.

And yet. “We stick to your original plan. If I’m there as a hostage, maybe they'll trust him enough.” Everyone was looking at him again, quiet. Yuri glanced at Otabek’s somber face and then away, scowling. “It's the only way out of this that makes any sense.”

Yuuri and Viktor traded a look, that silent communication once again. When they looked back at him, Yuri realized that they would not protest; his idea was a good one, and probably the only way to make this situation something other than hopeless. There would be no further arguments over acceptable risk. Yuri was an adult, he was an agent. He felt slightly outside of his body.

“Don't do this.”

It was a plea, not a command. Yuri met Otabek’s eyes across the room. Distantly he wondered if this was going to turn into some scene from a movie, with the man who loved him dramatically begging him not to go on what everyone in this room knew was a suicide mission. Perhaps a tearful kiss goodbye, Otabek sweeping him up in his arms if the begging failed. 

But Otabek only asked the once. His eyes bore into Yuri's, every line on his face tight with worry. It was as distraught as Yuri had ever seen him. 

In the movies, people always seemed to know what to say at moments like these. But all words had deserted Yuri. Instead he just felt the worn-in, familiar shape of his anger falling over him like an old cloak.

“Get moving already,” he snarled at Viktor. To Yuuri, “Since you fucked up by not leaving any bruises on me, do you at least have a gun to point at my face?”

“Sure.” Yuuri gave him a tight smile, sad at the edges. Viktor smiled at him too, bright and proud before he turned away to disappear into the tunnel in the wall.

Yuri couldn’t meet Otabek’s eyes, and Otabek didn’t linger waiting for him to become less of a coward. Within moments he was gone as well.

Two stories below, Yuri faintly heard the sound of footsteps. He and Yuuri hurried out of the secret room, the wall sealing shut behind them. They dragged the dead bratva closer to the center of the room, to hopefully imply that the scuffle had just recently finished. Yuuri explained in a hushed whisper that this building had been used as a KATSUDON safehouse ages ago, though it was now abandoned. Viktor knew the layout, and it was quite likely that the mole did too.

“Give me your hands,” Yuuri said. Yuri reluctantly offered his wrists, heart hammering as he listened for boots on the stairs, so close now. He didn't want zip ties around his wrists again, but at least Yuuri didn't do it so tight this time.

“Sorry about this,” Yuuri said, and before Yuri could respond with more than a sneer, his feet were knocked out from under him. He fell to his knees and then Yuuri was yanking his head back with a painful grip on his hair. A gun barrel was shoved behind the hinge of his jaw, also painful, digging in hard to his skull.

Yuuri had been held at gunpoint before, but never quite so intimately. He tried to concentrate on his breathing, tried not to give the panic any hold on him.

“In here!” Yuuri shouted. And within moments they were no longer alone.

Seven bratva filled the room, guns drawn. “What the fuck is this,” barked the closest one.

“The hostages escaped because you fucked me by only giving me Ivan for backup. I managed to subdue Plisetsky, the other is probably on the roof by now.”

The closest bratva jerked his chin towards the others and two split away, presumably towards the roof. The gun barrel ground hard into the flesh behind Yuri’s ear, and his body didn't realize that this was a faked threat. He couldn't bring himself to do so much as swallow.

If Otabek and Viktor had in fact escaped to the roof, the threat they’d be facing would be very real. Worrying was a useless diversion. Yuri kept his mind narrowed to the people in this room.

The bratva-in-charge seemed to communicate primarily through chin jerks, because he now glanced back at Yuuri and motioned with his hefty jawline towards the door again. Yuuri manhandled Yuri to his feet and shoved him forward, the gun never letting up the pressure against his skin. It was awkward to walk like this, with his hands bound behind him and Yuuri gripping his arm, keeping their bodies locked tightly in step. Yuri was somewhat familiar with these motions, having used hostages as body shields before to get out of sticky situations. He’d never been on the receiving end like this. His shoulders were starting to twinge from having his hands bound.

The bratva led led them down the stairs, then into a waiting room down the opposite side of the hall from the closet where Yuri and Otabek had been kept. This room had the same harsh fluorescent lighting as the secret room upstairs. 

The head bratva communicated, with a few grunts in addition to the chin jerks this time, that he wanted Yuuri to surrender his gun. Yuuri grumbled, but he was in no position to argue. Yuri was briefly held by other men as Yuuri stepped forward to be patted down, all other weapons removed from him. 

The bratva didn’t seem to mind holding on to Yuri rather than having Yuuri supervise him, which was definitely bad news for them. But then the unmistakeable sound of gunshots, followed by a number of different voices shouting, came from far above them. A confrontation on the roof. 

There seemed to be some confusion amongst the bratva, some raised voices and some orders hissed through clenched teeth. Some people left the room in a hurry, new people entered. Amidst the reshuffling, Yuuri managed to regain responsibility of his hostage without seeming like that had been his goal. 

As pleasant as it was to not have a gun barrel bruising his skull anymore, Yuri still would have vastly preferred for Yuuri to remain armed. He felt the kind of eery calm wash over him that generally signified that he was in a hopeless situation that warranted panic. This room had no exits save for the one door at the front, no convenient grates leading to tunnels in the wall, no place for Viktor or Otabek (if they were still alive) to drop in for a rescue. 

The room was only somewhat larger than an elevator and it was cramped, with three goons behind them and two on either side, plus the bratva-in-charge standing guard by the door. All their assault rifles added to the crowding, too. Perhaps Yuri should not be hoping for the mole to show himself already, as this would almost certainly hasten his demise, but he didn’t want to spend more time than necessary being jostled about and smelling everyone’s sweat. Let this be done already.

He got his wish. Yuuri’s fingers tightened reflexively around Yuri’s bicep as someone pushed the door open. It was Georgi. Yuri was not in a position where he had to fake his loyalties, so he didn’t repress the way his body jerked in revolted recognition. 

“ _Bliad,_ ” Yuri hissed, and gave in to the impulse to spit. The room was so small that he got the satisfaction of seeing his spittle spray across Georgi’s awful lying traitorous face. 

The reaction was instantaneous: in the same moment as Georgi startled backward, Yuuri twisted Yuri’s arm painfully behind him and cuffed the side of his head, also painfully. Yuri heard the sound of several guns being cocked and knew without needing to look up that every muzzle in the room now pointed his way.

“So consistent, Plisetsky. I could set my watch by your toothless insults.” Georgi’s voice was both horribly familiar and newly horrifying, each word snaked through with a rotten coldness that he had never revealed in all their previous conversations. How many years had this venom been working to consume Georgi? Or had he always been this rotten, and Yuri’s careless dislike had kept him from seeing that he should in fact hate him instead?

“Please let’s not encourage him, he can be very…. Tiring.” Yuuri sounded exasperated, strained, but his voice carried no trace of alarm for his partner, nor anger or surprise at the reveal of Georgi’s identity as the real mole. Yuri could see now why he’d been chosen for this job.

“Tiring.” Georgi turned his sneer on Yuuri now. Yuri let his head continue to lol down and watched him from beneath the fall of his hair. “You told me you could handle him.”

“Obviously I’m handling him. Why are we standing here wasting time like this? You told me this rendezvous was in preparation for moving against headquarters.”

Georgi gave a dismissive, one-shouldered shrug. “Plans change. Now we have Viktor and that Kazakh here. Removing all three of them would be plenty of a blow and far less costly than targeting all of KATSUDON.”

“That’s just laziness, striking at what’s in front of you instead of planning a more complete assault.” Yuuri shook Yuri roughly for emphasis, and after the jostling Yuri felt something sharp and cold pressing into the zip ties around his wrists. It must be a razor hidden in Yuuri’s clothes, similar to the one Otabek had in his belt.

Yuuri was enabling him to be ready to fight as soon as everything went south. Well, as soon as the plummet got dramatic; they had of course been steadily sloping downward this entire time.

Georgi regarded them with a predatory tilt of his head. “I’m no perfectionist. Removing four experienced agents in one night should be plenty devastating enough to the heart of our agency.”

Yuuri continued to hold Georgi’s stare for two long seconds. Yuri took the time to press his wrists swiftly back against the razor, and in his haste he felt it slice through not just the zip ties, but his flesh as well. Then Yuuri threw him forward, and Yuri already had his hands up ready to rip Georgi’s face off starting with his horrendous eye makeup when someone in the hallway shouted just as the wall to the left of the door exploded. Viktor and Otabek had made it down from the roof.

The force of the explosion sent Yuri sprawling, but he managed to keep his grip on Georgi, both of them rolling and scrabbling and being battered by rubble. He couldn’t spare worries for his partner, probably riddled with bullets by now, because he and Georgi were continuously exchanging the upper-hand. 

Everything blurred. Yuri’s eyes and nostrils and lungs filled with concrete dust. One moment Georgi’s hands wrapped clawlike around his throat, the next his knee connected hard with a kidney, the next he was digging his thumbs into eye sockets as hard as he could. But it seemed that perhaps the power exchange was over, because nothing could remove those hands from his throat, and Yuri’s vision was blackening at the edges.

“I hate you,” Georgi snarled. It seemed to be all he could say, repeating the fact of his hatred over and over, too consumed to even give Yuri a proper villain monologue as he killed him. He was leaning in so that Yuri could feel his hot breath, close as a lover, close enough to drench Yuri in the sudden gush of blood when someone shot him in the throat. 

Yuri shoved Georgi off him as his body jolted, as he tried to scream. Yuri was having trouble gasping for air himself, respirating blood spray and dust from the explosion. The angle of the shot meant it had to have come from someone at his same level. He looked to his right and there was Otabek, gun still drawn and smoking, lying beneath a bratva agent with a fresh hole in his skull. He must have shot his own man and then shot to the side to free Yuri right after.

He struggled through several breaths while they looked at each other. Otabek’s face was splattered with blood, the same as Yuri’s was. His hair was matted, dark and wet around a head wound. At Yuri’s other side, Georgi was making horrible choking noises as he flopped around, dying slowly. 

It should be impossible to sustain a swell of romantic feelings under the circumstances. But Yuri was a fucking good spy, and he could compartmentalize anything. And right now he loved Otabek so entirely.

***

With Georgi out of the picture, the remaining bratva cared more about fighting their way out than they did about taking out four KATSUDON agents. This, more than anything else, signaled the embarrassing smallness of Georgi’s operation; from the beginning they had all assumed that the mole must be working for some grander cause, some great conspiracy, but as intelligence gathered in the coming weeks would show, he had only ever been petty. 

Georgi had no higher cause: he’d turned against their agency when his romantic relationship began to sour, needing a scapegoat for his ex-girlfriend’s disinterest in him. He’d embezzled enough to pay off the bratva, and he had never thought larger than simply causing as much destruction as he could.

It made Yuri furious. Lives had been lost, agents’ bodies had been broken, and they had all lived beneath this bleak violent shadow for half a year, and it turned out to all be for nothing but the sake of one man’s failed relationship. It had felt like the end of the world. Instead it was the most common story in the world, an entitled moron radicalized by a woman rejecting him.

***

Yuri’s memories of the immediate aftermath were dim. He was unsure of the exact sequence of events: most of the bratva fled, at some point other KATSUDON agents showed up, at some point Yuuri fainted from blood loss due to the gut wound he’d been trying to hide from them. Viktor and Yakov did a fair amount of shouting at each other--apparently much of tonight’s mission and the events leading up to it had not been in any way authorized. Helicopters arrived to get Yuuri to the emergency room, trucks arrived to take the rest of them to the same destination with slightly less urgency. Yuri examined the (shallow, thankfully) wound to Otabek’s scalp with his fingers, then was brushed aside by medics who examined him more brusquely and declared a concussion. Yuri promised not to let Otabek fall asleep. 

They stuck by each other’s side through the chaos and the changing locations. No one tried very hard to separate them, or at least no one tried after the initial attempts failed. Otabek was tired but resolute, immovable, and while Yuri didn’t have much of a voice after the strangulation attempt, his glares were sufficient to dissuade anyone who tried to pull either of them away from the other.

HQ was in uproar. No one understood the reasons behind Georgi’s betrayal yet. Higher-ups were scrambling to investigate. Most of Yuri’s compatriots struggled to believe it. Yuri supposed that he might find it hard to believe, too, had he not felt Georgi’s hands trying to squeeze the life out of him.

When they were finally released from the hospital, Otabek turned to Yuri and stated blandly that his apartment was closer. Yuri nodded his acceptance and wrapped his arm around Otabek’s waist as they left together.

***

They were given two weeks’ leave. Yuri was surprised at such generosity, but figured it was probably a sign that command hierarchy needed some time to digest everything that had happened. Also Yuri’s voice was slow to return to normal, and the bruises encircling his neck were slow to fade. 

Yuuri was bedridden at the hospital for three days. Yuri went to visit him as soon as he was cleared for visitors. When he arrived, Yuuri was asleep and Viktor sat at his side reading a magazine. 

“Yurio. I hope you’ve been convalescing.” Viktor looked up, setting his magazine aside. There were dark circles beneath his eyes, and the smile that came with his greeting was brief and slight.

“I’m fine.” Yuri shrugged, aware that his voice sounded like dog shit scraped over gravel, thus perhaps contradicting his statement. “Is there another chair in here?”

“Have mine, I need to get some coffee anyway.” 

Shortly after Yuri sat down and Viktor left, Yuuri shifted on the bed, his eyes opening to slits. Yuri wondered if he hadn’t been asleep at all, and Viktor had just left to give them privacy. 

“When the hell did you get stabbed?” Yuri demanded. “None of us even realized you’d been injured until you went down.”

Yuuri smiled. “Hello to you too. And I’m not exactly sure, but I think it happened towards the end, maybe even after Georgi went down. A lot was happening at once.”

“You shouldn’t have tried to hide it from us, idiot.”

Yuuri laughed a bit, then winced. “I shouldn’t have done a lot of things.”

Yuri folded his arms over his chest and slouched down in the uncomfortable visitor’s chair, looking away from Yuuri’s eyes. “Does that mean you’re beating yourself up about the whole kidnapping thing?”

“Of course. I feel terrible.”

Yuri was silent. He knew that he should tell Yuuri not to feel guilty, that it had all turned out okay in the end, that he understood the necessity of it all. But Yuri’s forgiveness felt like an incomplete thing still. It was strange; during those moments of crisis he’d trusted his partner with his life, all feelings of betrayal shoved aside, rendered moot. 

But apparently not forgotten. There had been those moments, when Yuuri had shoved Otabek into the closet with him, tied up and gagged. The long fearful seconds before Otabek had confirmed that he was uninjured. It was still immediate for Yuri, close and real and making words of forgiveness stick in his throat.

But perhaps Yuuri understood, because he didn’t wait for an apology, already waving a hand to dismiss his feeling terrible. “Are you at Otabek’s place?”

“Yeah. It’s pretty close to here. And…” Yuri trailed off, embarrassed, but Yuuri nodded, not needing it explained that neither Yuri nor Otabek wanted to be alone right now.

“Do you think you two will move in together?”

“What? No! I mean, I don’t know. We’re not even--” Yuri stopped his stuttering, blushing furiously. He didn’t know why he was trying to protest that he and Otabek were devoted to each other, hopefully now for good. Everyone had witnessed the way Yuri had tried to bite the hands off anyone who’d tried to separate them after the bratva fight. And yet it still felt deeply strange for their relationship to just be… known, accepted as fact.

Yuuri gave him a benign smile. “I’m glad the two of you have worked things out. I hope I can get to know him better. We got off to a rocky start.”

Yuri snorted. “I’m sure he understands.”

“I hope so. I don’t want my partner’s boyfriend to remain suspicious of me. That is, if you’ll still have me as a partner. I would understand a reassignment request.”

It was slightly evil of Yuuri to throw in the word ‘boyfriend’ into a sentence already loaded with emotion. Yuri wanted to ignore it with dignity but he found himself choking a bit and reddening further. “Dumbass! I never wanted to work with you in the first place but I got through it, didn’t I?! Why would that change now.”

Yuuri smiled and closed his eyes, settling back on his pillow. “You’re sweet, Yurio.”

Yuri buried his head in his hands and growled. “How much morphine are you on?”

“So much. Loads.”

“Right. Yeah. Get well soon, or whatever.” Yuri stood up and slunk out of the room, embarrassed. Of course Viktor was right out in the hallway, well within earshot and looking more chipper now with a cup of coffee in hand.

“Fuck off,” Yuri snapped at him when Viktor squeezed his shoulder. Viktor just laughed, and told Yuri to give his best to Otabek.

***

“They’re both terrible,” Yuri said when he got back to Otabek’s apartment. Otabek was sitting in the kitchen, peeling an orange while water boiled. He looked up, raising an eyebrow at Yuri’s scowl.

“Viktor and Yuuri Katsuki,” Yuri explained. “They’re both so in-sync, always working together to make my life hell.”

“I knew who you meant,” Otabek said. “How is Katsuki doing?”

“He’s not actively dying, I guess. I don’t know. We talked a bit. He feels guilty.”

Otabek nodded and set his orange down on the table. He leaned back in the chair and Yuri went to him, sitting on Otabek’s thighs and bringing his knees up against the table ledge, his back against the counter, tucking himself into the narrow space. Otabek’s arm hooked beneath his knees to hold him close.

“Do you want to live together?”

Yuri wanted to cut his own tongue out. Fuck pork cutlet bowl for putting the damn idea in his head. He hadn’t thought once about asking, the words had just tumbled out of his mouth on their own accord. The excitement of the last week must have done damage to his mental faculties.

“Yes. Of course.” Yuri could feel the vibration of Otabek’s voice against his chest. He closed his eyes. He was glad they weren’t looking at each other. 

Otabek squeezed Yuri’s thigh, gently. “Do you?”

“Yeah. I guess. I mean, it makes sense, right?”

“Sure.” Otabek pressed a kiss to Yuri’s temple. Yuri shivered and clung to him harder. His chest felt scraped by too many unknown facets of his future, each anxious thought beating its own pair of wings and cluttering up his insides. It was disorienting the way things had turned upside down: Otabek had always been the biggest unknown for him, yet here they were, certain and real. 

Yuri turned to meet Otabek’s eyes and kiss him. Otabek kissed him back, cradling him to his chest and tangling his fingers in Yuri’s hair. Yuri smiled into Otabek’s mouth, glad for his warmth, his solidity, glad for everything that made up Otabek. Even with the exhausting shock of everything else, in the moment Yuri couldn’t see the horizon line of his happiness; it stretched on without end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I  
> return to you, beloved.  
> This is my heart,  
> and I delight in it.  
> Coming home is a joy.  
> People scrape off their dirt,  
> shaving and washing.  
> So I  
> return to you—  
> for if  
> I go to you,  
> am I not going home?  
> The earth takes back her creatures.  
> We return to our destination.  
> So I  
> am drawn towards you  
> relentlessly,  
> as soon as we part  
> or don’t see each other.
> 
> _-Vladimir Mayakovsky, "I Love"_
> 
>  
> 
> *
> 
> I'm sorry that this took me a while to finish! Thank you to everyone who has been following it, I hope that the ending is satisfying. As always, forever indebted to marbleflan for her edits, ideas and encouragement.

**Author's Note:**

> i am [zeegoesthere](http://zeegoesthere.tumblr.com) on tumblr, please feel free to come join in my perpetual meltdown over otayuri.


End file.
